Merritt Ruhlen

Merritt Ruhlen
Born	10 May 1944 Washington, D.C.
Nationality	United States
Fields	Linguistics
Known for	Genetic classification of languages
Influences	Joseph Greenberg Sergei Starostin Morris Swadesh Alfredo Trombetti

Merritt Ruhlen (/ˈmɛrɪt ˈruːlən/; born 1944) is an American linguist who has worked on the classification of languages and what this reveals about the origin and evolution of modern humans. Amongst other linguists, Ruhlen's work is recognized as standing outside the mainstream of comparative-historical linguistics. He is the principal advocate and defender of Joseph Greenberg's approach to language classification.

Born Frank Merritt Ruhlen, 1944, Ruhlen studied at Rice University, the University of Paris, the University of Illinois and the University of Bucharest. He received his PhD in 1973 from Stanford University with a dissertation on the generative analysis of Romanian morphology. Subsequently, Ruhlen worked for several years as a research assistant on the Stanford Universals Project, directed by Joseph Greenberg and Charles Ferguson.

Since 1994, he has been a lecturer in Anthropological Sciences and Human Biology at Stanford and co-director, along with Murray Gell-Mann and Sergei Starostin, of the Santa Fe Institute Program on the Evolution of Human Languages. Since 2005, Ruhlen has been on the advisory board of the Genographic Project and held appointment as a visiting professor at the City University of Hong Kong. Ruhlen knew and worked with Joseph Greenberg for three-and-a-half decades and became the principal advocate and defender of Greenberg's methods of language classification.

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