24 Facts About Sarah Thomason

Sarah Grey Thomason is an American scholar of linguistics, Bernard Bloch distinguished professor emerita at the University of Michigan.

Sarah Thomason is best known for her work on language contact, historical linguistics, pidgins and creoles, Slavic Linguistics, Native American languages and typological universals.

Sarah Thomason has an interest in debunking linguistic pseudoscience, and has collaborated with publications such as the Skeptical Inquirer, The Encyclopedia of the Paranormal and American Speech, in regard to claims of xenoglossy.

Sarah Thomason taught Slavic Linguistics at Yale from 1968 to 1971, before moving to the University of Pittsburgh in 1972.

Sarah Thomason was named the William J Gedney Collegiate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Michigan in 1999, and received the highest honor granted by the University of Michigan to its faculty by being named the Bernard Bloch Distinguished University Professor of Linguistics in 2016.

Sarah Thomason was Chair of the Department of Linguistics from 2010 to 2013.

Sarah Thomason had a great interest on learning how to do fieldwork about Indo-European languages.

Sarah Thomason decided that Indo-European languages from Eastern Europe would be best suited for research as Western European languages had been already thoroughly studied and the literature was vast.

Sarah Thomason traveled to the former Yugoslavia and started preparing her project on Serbo-Croatian, with the intention of focusing her career on Slavic studies.

Sarah Thomason would spend a year in this region writing her dissertation project on noun suffixation in Serbo-Croatian dialectology.

Sarah Thomason realized that language contact was crucial for an understanding of language change.

Since then, Sarah Thomason has dedicated the vast majority of her work to language contact phenomena.

Sarah Thomason is known for her contributions to the study of Native American languages.

Sarah Thomason has spent every summer since 1980 studying Montana Salish, or Salish-Pend d'Oreille language, talking with its last fluent speakers with the objective of documenting the language, as well as creating a dictionary for the Salish and Pend d'Oreille Culture Committee language program, compiling a dictionary and materials for the Salish-Pend d'Oreille language program.

Sarah Thomason argues that under a situation of language contact bilingual speakers can adapt loanwords to their language structure, and that speakers are capable of rejecting changes to the structure of their language.

Sarah Thomason has criticized alleged cases of xenoglossy from a professional point of view as a linguist.

Sarah Thomason has examined, among others, the cases presented by author Ian Stevenson.

Sarah Thomason analyzed those cases and concluded that the subjects did not show real knowledge of the foreign language they said they were able to speak.

Sarah Thomason noticed that the speech produced was many times limited to a repetition of some phrases or short answers, and it sometimes included words in a different language than the one subjects claimed to be able to speak.

Sarah Thomason argues that the structure of the experiment allowed for the subjects to be able to guess the meaning of some of the questions by the hypnotists.

Sarah Thomason concludes that none of the individuals studied by Stevenson could prove xenoglossy, and that their knowledge of the foreign language could be explained by a combination of natural means such as exposure to the language, use of cognates, and guesses, amongst other resources.

Sarah Thomason is a prolific contributor to academic journals and publications specializing in the field of linguistics, as well as a guest lecturer at different universities around the world and a speaker at international conferences.

Sarah Thomason was Chair of the Linguistics and Language Sciences section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1996, and Secretary of the section from 2001 to 2005.

Sarah Thomason is currently an associate editor for the Journal of Historical Linguistics, as well as part of the advisory board of the Journal of Language Contact.