Judith Aissen

Judith Aissen is an American linguist born June 4, 1948, who is professor emerita of linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, after earning her PhD from Harvard University in 1974. She began studying Mayan languages in 1972 as a graduate student conducting fieldwork in Chiapas, Mexico, and her research centers on the syntax and morphology of Mayan languages, particularly the obviation system and differential object marking she identified in Tzotzil. Since 1995 she has run regular workshops in Chiapas training native Tzotzil-speaking students in syntactic analysis, work recognized by the Kenneth L. Hale Award in 2018 for her documentation of Tzotzil and other Mayan languages. She was elected a fellow of the Linguistic Society of America in 2008 and was honored with a festschrift in 2011.