Edith Frances Ruth Bradley Holmes (November 26, 1924 – September 2, 2021) was an American linguist, educator, and polyglot who authored two Cherokee language textbooks. Holmes served on the Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education from 1975 to 1985. She taught Russian language at Louisiana State University and Russian and Cherokee language adult education courses in Bartlesville, Oklahoma.
Josette Rey-Debove (November 16, 1929 – February 22, 2005), was a French lexicographer and semiologist. She was the first female lexicographer in France, and held many prominent posts in this field, where she used her influence to promote feminist changes to French language usage. Her husband, Alain Rey, was also her colleague.
Alleen Pace Nilsen is an American literary scholar, linguist, and one of the pioneers of both humor studies and children's literature studies. She is Professor Emeritus in the Department of English at Arizona State University, where she was previously the director of the English Education Program.
Together with her husband Don Nilsen, she co-founded the International Society for Humor Studies.
Mary Rosamond Haas (January 23, 1910 – May 17, 1996) was an American linguist who specialized in North American Indian languages, Thai, and historical linguistics. She served as president of the Linguistic Society of America. She was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
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.
Suzette Haden Elgin (born Patricia Anne Suzette Wilkins; November 18, 1936 – January 27, 2015) was an American researcher in experimental linguistics, construction and evolution of languages and poetry and science fiction writer. She founded the Science Fiction Poetry Association and is considered an important figure in the field of science fiction constructed languages. Her best-known non-fiction includes her Verbal Self-Defense series.