20th-century linguists

Gerhard Rohlfs (July 14, 1892 – September 12, 1986) was a German linguist. He taught Romance languages and literature at the universities in Tübingen and Munich. He was described as an "archeologist of words".

W. Nelson Francis (October 23, 1910 – June 14, 2002) was an American author, linguist, and university professor. He served as a member of the faculties of Franklin & Marshall College and Brown University, where he specialized in English and corpus linguistics. He is known for his work compiling a text collection entitled the Brown University Standard Corpus of Present-Day American English, which he completed with Henry Kučera.

Eloise Jelinek (February 2, 1924 in Dallas – December 21, 2007 in Tucson) was an American linguist specializing in the study of syntax. Her 1981 doctoral dissertation at the University of Arizona was titled "On Defining Categories: AUX and PREDICATE in Colloquial Egyptian Arabic". She was a member of the faculty of the University of Arizona from 1981 to 1992.She became particularly known for her Pronominal Argument Hypothesis of syntax based on data from the Navajo language, which holds that in some languages the pronominal affixes on the verb should be considered the syntactic arguments of the verbs, rather than the noun phrases that occur free in the clause, which should only be considered adjuncts.Through her work on many endangered languages she demonstrated that less-studied languages often challenged the theories of generative linguistics, and she worked to develop ways of integrating this data into the generative paradigm. Among the languages that she worked on are the Straits Salish languages Samish and Lummi, as well as Navajo, Choctaw, and Yaqui.

Mathilda (Til) Brugman (16 September 1888, Amsterdam – 24 July 1958, Gouda) was a Dutch author, poet, translator, and linguist.

Emil Orgetorix Gustav Forrer (also rrik O. Forrer; German: [ˈfɔʀɐ]; February 19,1894 – January 10,1986) was a Swiss Assyriologist and pioneering Hittitologist. He was the first to point out the relevance of references to Wilusa in Hittite inscriptions to the accounts of the Trojan War in the epics of Homer.
Forrer was born in Straßburg, Alsace-Lorraine. Emil Forrer developed a deviant interdisciplinary field of research (Meropisforschung), based on textual fragments of the Greek historian Theopompus of Chios, and dealing with assumed pre- or protohistoric contacts between the Old- and the New World. Antithetic to the prevailing academic school of thought, Forrer advocated the idea that Theopompos of Chios’s "Meropis" was not a fictional parody of Atlantis but an actual geographic entity. Forrer died in San Salvador.

Maurice Grevisse (French: [mɔʁis ɡʁevis]; 7 October 1895 – 4 July 1980) was a Belgian grammarian.

Carl Hjalmar Borgstrøm (1909–1986) was a Norwegian professor of Indo-European linguistics who made significant contributions to the scientific study of Scottish Gaelic and Irish.His key publications on Scottish Gaelic include:

(1937) The dialect of Barra in the Outer Hebrides Norsk Tidsskrift for Sprogvidenskap 8
(1940) A linguistic survey of the Gaelic dialects of Scotland. The dialects of the Outer Hebrides Oslo University Press
(1941) A linguistic survey of the Gaelic dialects of Scotland. The dialects of Skye and Ross-shire Oslo University Press

Knut Bergsland (7 March 1914 – 9 July 1998) was a Norwegian linguist. Working as a professor at the University of Oslo from 1947 to 1981, he did groundbreaking research in Uralic (especially Sami) and Eskaleut languages.

Amado Alonso (13 September 1896, Lerín Navarre, Spain – 26 May 1952, Arlington, Massachusetts) was a Spanish philologist, linguist and literary critic, who became a naturalised citizen of Argentina and one of the founders of stylistics.
He was a pupil of Ramón Menéndez Pidal at the Center for Historical Studies in Madrid, where he worked on phonetic and geographical linguistics. Between 1927 and 1946 he lived in Buenos Aires, where he headed the Institute of Philology. He then went to Harvard University and lived in America until his death.

Maurice Gross (born 21 July 1934 in Sedan, Ardennes department; died 8 December 2001 in Paris) was a French linguist and scholar of Romance languages. Beginning in the late 1960s he developed Lexicon-Grammar, a method of formal description of languages with practical applications.