Sarah Thomason

Who is Sarah Thomason?

Sarah Grey Thomason is an American scholar of linguistics. She has been the William J. Gedney Collegiate Professor of Linguistics and Chair of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Michigan since 1999.

She is best known for her work on language contact, historical linguistics, pidgins and creoles, Slavic Linguistics, typological universals, and xenoglossy. She has also worked since 1981 documenting Montana Salish. She is one of the Language Log bloggers.

Thomason received a B.A. in German from Stanford University in 1961, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Yale University. She taught Slavic Linguistics at Yale from 1968 to 1971 before moving to the University of Pittsburgh in 1972.

From 1988 to 1994 she was the editor of Language, the journal of the Linguistic Society of America. In 1999 she was Collitz Professor at the Linguistic Society of America summer institute. In 2000 she was President of the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas.