Royal Skousen

Royal J. Skousen
Skousen giving a lecture at BYU.
Born	Royal Jon Skousen (1945-08-05) August 5, 1945 (age 71) Cleveland, Ohio
Nationality	American
Education	Brigham Young University (B.A.) in English University of Illinois (PhD) in Linguistics
Occupation	Linguistics Professor
Relatives	W. Cleon Skousen (Uncle) Mark Skousen (Brother) Joel Skousen (Brother)

Royal Jon Skousen (born August 5, 1945) is a professor of linguistics and English at Brigham Young University (BYU), where he is editor of the Book of Mormon Critical Text Project. He is "the leading expert on the textual history of the Book of Mormon" and the founder of the analogical modeling approach to language modeling.

Skousen was born in Cleveland, Ohio to Leroy Bentley Skousen and Helen Louise Skousen, a Latter-day Saint (LDS or Mormon) family, and was one of eleven children. Leroy was a younger brother to W. Cleon Skousen. Royal graduated from Sunset High School in Beaverton, Oregon. After his father's unexpected death from lung cancer in 1964 (though he never smoked), Skousen served as a missionary in Finland from 1965 to 1967. He is fluent in Finnish.

Skousen received his B.A. degree from BYU, with a major in English and a minor in mathematics. Skousen went on to study linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, there earning his Ph.D. degree in 1972. He was then an assistant professor of linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin until 1979, when he joined the faculty of BYU. Skousen was also a visiting professor at the University of California, San Diego in 1981, a Fulbright lecturer at the University of Tampere in Finland in 1982, and a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, Netherlands in 2001. In 1999, BYU presented him the Karl G. Maeser Excellence in Research and Creative Arts Awards.