- Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky, Ph.D (born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher, political activist, and a prolific author and lecturer. He is the Institute Professor Emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Chomsky is credited with the creation of the theory of generative grammar, considered to be one of the most significant contributions to the field of linguistics made in the 20th century. - George Lakoff
George Lakoff is Goldman Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has served for 36 years. Before that, he taught at Harvard and the University of Michigan. His new book is "The Political Mind: Why You Can't Understand 21st Century Politics with an 18th Century Brain." - Ferdinand de Saussure
Ferdinand de Saussure (November 26, 1857 – February 22, 1913) was a Geneva-born Swiss linguist whose ideas laid the foundation for many of the significant developments in linguistics in the 20th century. He is widely considered the 'father' of 20th-century linguistics. - David Crystal
Professor David Crystal, OBE (born 1941 in Lisburn, Northern Ireland, UK) is a linguist, academic and author. He grew up in Holyhead, North Wales, and Liverpool, England where he attended St Mary's College from 1951. He grew up bilingual in Welsh and English, which influenced his approach to language education. Crystal studied English at University College London between 1959 and 1962. He was a researcher under Randolph Quirk between 1962 and 1963, … - Roman Jakobson
Roman Osipovich Jakobson was a Russian thinker who became one of the most influential linguists of the 20th century by pioneering the development of structural analysis of language, poetry, and art. - Mark Liberman
Mark Liberman is a linguist. He has a dual appointment at the University of Pennsylvania, as Trustee Professor of Phonetics in the Department of Linguistics, and as a professor in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences. He is also currently the director of the Linguistic Data Consortium. He is an alumnus of MIT, having completed his PhD there in 1975. Liberman's main research interests lie in phonetics, prosody, and other aspects of speech communication. - Edward Sapir
Edward Sapir, (January 26 1884 - February 4 1939) was an American anthropologist-linguist, a leader in American structural linguistics, and one of the creators of what is now called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. He is arguably the most influential figure in American linguistics, influencing several generations of linguists across several schools of linguistics. - Deborah Tannen
Deborah Frances Tannen (born June 7, 1945) is an American professor of sociolinguistics at Georgetown University. Although she has lectured worldwide in her field, and written or edited numerous academic publications on linguistics and interpersonal communication, she is best known for her general-audience books on interpersonal communication and public discourse. - John McCarthy
John McCarthy (born 1953 in Medford, Massachusetts) is a linguist and professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst with a speciality in phonology and morphology. He was educated at Harvard University and MIT and was responsible, along with Alan Prince, for extending autosegmental phonology, and later Optimality Theory, to morphology. - Jacques Lacan
Jacques-Marie-Émile Lacan (April 13, 1901 - September 9, 1981) was a French psychoanalyst, psychiatrist, and doctor. Lacan’s ‘return to the meaning of Freud’ profoundly changed the institutional face of the psychoanalytic movement internationally. The Seminars of Jacques Lacan, which started in 1953 and lasted until his death in 1981, were one of the formative environments of the currency of philosophical ideas that dominated French letters in the 1960s and '70s, … - William Labov
William Labov is an American linguist, widely regarded as the founder of the discipline of variationist sociolinguistics. He has been described as "an enormously original and influential figure who has created much of the methodology" of sociolinguistics. He is employed as a professor in the linguistics department of the University of Pennsylvania, and pursues research in sociolinguistics, language change, and dialectology. - Morris Halle
Morris Halle, né Pinkowitz, is an American linguist. He was born in Liepaja, Latvia, in 1923, and moved with his family to Riga in 1929. They arrived in the United States in 1940. From 1941 to 1943, Halle studied engineering at the City College of New York. He entered the United States Army in 1943 and was discharged in 1946, at which point he went to the University of Chicago, where he got his master's degree in linguistics in 1948. - Alexander von Humboldt
(September 14, 1769, Berlin – May 6, 1859, Berlin) was a Prussian naturalist and explorer, and the younger brother of the Prussian minister, philosopher, and linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt. Humboldt's quantitative work on botanical geography was foundational to the field of biogeography. Between 1799 and 1804, von Humboldt travelled to Latin America, exploring and describing it from a scientific point of view for the first time. - Ray Jackendoff
Ray Jackendoff (born January 23, 1945) is an influential contemporary linguist who has always straddled the boundary between generative linguistics and cognitive linguistics, committed as he is both to the existence of an innate Universal Grammar (an important thesis of generative linguistics) and to giving an account of language that meshes well with the current understanding of the human mind and cognition (the main purpose of cognitive linguistics). - Peter Trudgill
Professor Peter Trudgill (born 1943 in Norwich, England) is a sociolinguist, academic and author. He grew up in Norwich, where he attended the City of Norwich School from 1955. Trudgill studied modern languages at King's College, Cambridge. He was later awarded a Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh in 1971. He taught in the Department of linguistic science at the University of Reading from 1970 to 1986, … - John McWhorter
John H. McWhorter (1965-), was associate professor of linguistics at University of California, Berkeley until 2003, and is now a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute think tank and a columnist for the "New York Sun". He is the author of several books on language and race relations. McWhorter attended Friends Select School (a Quaker high school in Philadelphia) and was accepted to Simon's Rock College after tenth grade. - Barbara Partee
Barbara Hall Partee (born June 23, 1940 in Englewood, New Jersey) is a Distinguished University Professor of Linguistics and Philosophy Emerita at UMass-Amherst. Partee is the primary creator of modern formal semantics. - Daniel Jurafsky
Daniel Jurafsky is an Associate Professor in Linguistics at Stanford University. With James Martin, he wrote the textbook Speech and Language Processing: An Introduction to Natural Language Processing, Speech Recognition, and Computational Linguistics. He was given a MacArthur Fellowship in 2002. - Peter Ladefoged
Peter Nielsen Ladefoged was an English-American linguist and phonetician who traveled the world to document the distinct sounds of endangered languages and pioneered ways to collect and study data. He was active at the universities of Edinburgh, Scotland and Ibadan, Nigeria 1953-61. At Edinburgh he studied phonetics with David Abercrombie, who himself had studied with Daniel Jones and was thus connected to Henry Sweet. - Leonard Bloomfield
Leonard Bloomfield was an American linguist, whose influence dominated the development of structural linguistics in America between the 1930s and the 1950s. He is especially known for his book "Language" (1933), describing the state of the art of linguistics at its time. Bloomfield was the main founder of the Linguistic Society of America. Bloomfield's thought was mainly characterized by its behavioristic principles for the study of meaning, … - Mark Turner
Mark Turner is a cognitive scientist, linguist, and author. He is Institute Professor and Professor of Cognitive Science at Case Western Reserve University. He was previously Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland and Associate Director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Turner has been a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, … - Gregory Bateson
Gregory Bateson was a British anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, and cyberneticist whose work intersected that of many other fields. Some of his most noted writings are to be found in his books, "Steps to an Ecology of Mind" (1972), "Mind and Nature" (1980), and "Angels Fear: Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred" (1988), the last published posthumously and co-authored with his daughter Mary Catherine Bateson. - Ivan Sag
Ivan Sag (born November 9, 1949 in Alliance, Ohio) is a professor of linguistics at Stanford University. With Carl Pollard, he has written several books that introduce and develop the syntactic theory known as head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG). He was also involved with work on generalized phrase structure grammar, HPSG's immediate intellectual predecessor. In addition, he has written numerous articles on problems of linguistic theory and analysis. - Wilhelm von Humboldt
Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand Freiherr von Humboldt, government functionary, diplomat, philosopher, founder of Humboldt Universität in Berlin, friend of Goethe and especially of Schiller, is especially remembered as a German linguist who introduced a knowledge of the Basque language to European intellectuals. His younger brother Alexander von Humboldt was an equally famous naturalist and scientist. - Andrew Carnie
Andrew Carnie (born April 19, 1969) is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Arizona. He is the author or coauthor of six books, and has several papers published on formal syntactic theory and on the lingustic aspects of the Irish language. He was born in Calgary, Alberta. He is also a well-known teacher of Balkan and international folk dance. - Lyle Campbell
Lyle Campbell is a linguist who is considered to be one of the foremost experts on Native American languages, especially the Mayan and Uto-Aztecan language families, as well as in historical linguistics. In addition to his expertise in Mesoamerican languages, he is also an expert on Finno-Ugric languages. He is presently Professor of Linguistics at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, and the director of the University's Center for American Indian Languages (CAIL). - Anthony Burgess
Anthony Burgess (February 25, 1917 - November 22, 1993) was a British novelist, critic and composer. He was also active as a librettist, poet, pianist, playwright, screenwriter, journalist, essayist, travel writer, broadcaster, translator, linguist and educationalist. Born in Harpurhey, Manchester in northwest England, he lived and worked variously in Southeast Asia, the United States and Mediterranean Europe. - Arnold Zwicky
Arnold M. Zwicky is a perennial Visiting Professor of linguistics at Stanford University, and Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of linguistics at the Ohio State University. A student of Morris Halle at MIT, he has made notable contributions over the year to fields of phonology (half-rhymes), morphology (realizational morphology, rules of referral), syntax (clitics, construction grammar), interfaces (the Principle of Phonology-Free Syntax), … - Heidi Harley
Heidi B. Harley (born September 26, 1969) is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Arizona. She is the author or coauthor of three books, and has several papers published on formal syntactic theory, morphology, and lexical semantics. She was born in Oregon, but was raised in St. John's, Newfoundland. She is one of the main researchers working in the theory of Distributed morphology. - John Grinder
John Grinder, Ph.D. (born 1940) is an American author and linguist. Grinder (pronounced grin-der,) is credited (with Richard Bandler) with the creation of the field of Neuro-linguistic programming. - Dell Hymes
Dell Hathaway Hymes (born June 7, 1927 in Portland, Oregon) is a sociolinguist, anthropologist, and folklorist whose work has dealt primarily with languages of the Pacific Northwest. - Jonathan Edwards
Jonathan Edwards (1745-1801) was an American theologian and linguist. Born in Northampton, Massachusetts, he was the second son of Jonathan Edwards, the elder. He graduated from Princeton in 1765, then studied theology under Joseph Bellamy, of Bethlehem, Conn. He was tutor in Princeton (1767-69), and pastor in White Haven, Connecticut (1769 -95). After serving as pastor in Colebrook, Connecticut (1795 - 99), he went to Schenectady, … - Joseph Greenberg
Joseph Harold Greenberg was a prominent and controversial linguist, known for his work in both language classification and typology. He was born in Brooklyn, New York, USA, and served for many years on the faculty of Stanford University. - Tanya Reinhart
Tanya Reinhart was an Israeli linguist who wrote frequently on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She contributed columns to the Israeli newspaper "Yediot Aharonot" and longer articles to the "CounterPunch", "Znet", and "Israeli Indymedia" websites. Reinhart studied philosophy and Hebrew literature at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem as an undergraduate, where she later received an M.A. in comparative literature and philosophy. - Dan Sperber
Dan Sperber is a French anthropologist, linguist and cognitive scientist, currently a Research Director at the Jean Nicod Institute, CNRS. He is known, amongst other things, for his work on pragmatics and in particular relevance theory; and also for his theory on “epidemiology of representations”. In the early Seventies, Sperber was one of the critics of the French structuralism in anthropology. - Christiane Fellbaum
Christiane Fellbaum, born in Braunschweig, has lived since 1969 in the United States. After graduating from Princeton University with a PhD in linguistics, she became a part of the Cognitive Science department under George A. Miller and has played an active role in the development of WordNet. In 2001, through the gift of the Wolfgang-Paul Prize of the Humboldt-Foundation, she started the 'Kollokationen im Wörterbuch' project at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences. - Joan Bresnan
Joan Wanda Bresnan (born August 22, 1945) is Professor of Linguistics at Stanford University. She is best known as one of the architects (with Ron Kaplan) of the theoretical framework of Lexical-Functional Grammar. Bresnan earned her doctorate in linguistics in 1972 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she studied with Noam Chomsky. In the early and mid 1970s, her work focused on complementation and wh-movement constructions within transformational grammar, … - Derek Bickerton
Derek Bickerton (born March 25, 1926) is a linguist and Professor Emeritus at the University of Hawaii, Honolulu. Based on his work in creole languages in Guyana and Hawaii, he has proposed that the features of creole languages provide powerful insights into the development of language both by individuals and as a feature of the human species. He is the father of contemporary artist Ashley Bickerton. A graduate of the University of Cambridge, England in 1949, … - Zellig Harris
Zellig Sabbetai Harris (October 23, 1909 - May 22, 1992) was an American linguist, mathematical syntactician, and methodologist of science. Originally a Semiticist, he is best known for his work in structural linguistics and discourse analysis and for the discovery of transformational structure in language, all achieved in the first 10 years of his career and published within the first 25. His contributions in the subsequent 35 years, including sublanguage grammar, … - Bernd Heine
Bernd Heine is a German linguist and specialist in African studies. From 1978 to 2004 Heine held the chair for African Studies at the University of Cologne, Germany. His main focal points in research and teaching are African linguistics, language sociology, grammaticalisation theory and language contact. The grammaticalisation theory, which deals with the changes in grammar, and to which he contributed 7 books and numerous articles, is his main focal point.
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