Sarah G. Thomason

Sarah Grey Thomason, also known as Sally Thomason, is an American linguist born in 1939 and the Bernard Bloch Distinguished University Professor Emerita of Linguistics at the University of Michigan, where she was named the William J. Gedney Collegiate Professor of Linguistics in 1999 after teaching Slavic linguistics at Yale from 1968 to 1971 and at the University of Pittsburgh beginning in 1972. Her research addresses historical linguistics and language contact, particularly the principles governing contact induced language change and the genesis of pidgins, creoles, and bilingual mixed languages, and she also specializes in Salish Pend d Oreille, also called Montana Salish, having worked every summer since 1981 with tribal elders on a dictionary and text collection of the language. She served as president of the Linguistic Society of America in 2009 and as president of the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas in 2000.