List of linguists

A linguist in the academic sense is a person who studies natural language (an academic discipline known as linguistics). Ambiguously, the word is sometimes also used to refer to a polyglot (one who knows several languages), a translator/interpreter (especially in the military), or a grammarian (a scholar of grammar), but these uses of the word are distinct (and one does not have to be multilingual in order to be an academic linguist).[1] The following is a list of notable academic linguists.

In the list the description should be like this:

surname, forename (country, year of birth-year of death), main achievement


  1. ^ The word linguistician has been coined to refer to one who studies linguistics, in order to avoid this ambiguity, although this word is vanishingly rare and has no currency in the field [1].