James Matisoff

Who is James Matisoff?

James A. Matisoff is a professor emeritus of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley and noted authority on Tibeto-Burman languages and other languages of mainland Southeast Asia.

Matisoff was born July 14, 1937, in Boston, Massachusetts, to a working-class family. He attended Harvard from 1954 to 1959, where he met his wife, Susan Matisoff, later a scholar of Japanese literature, when the two shared a Japanese class. He received two degrees from Harvard: an A.B. in Romance Languages and Literatures and an A.M. in French Literature. He then studied Japanese at International Christian University from 1960 to 1961.

He did his doctoral studies in Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, where Mary Haas, co-founder of the department, was then chair. Haas had been a student of Edward Sapir while at University of Chicago and Yale, and through her own extensive research in descriptive and documentary linguistics had become a specialist in Native American languages and an authority on Thai. Haas was instrumental in Matisoff’s decision to research a language of mainland Southeast Asia for his dissertation.