Terrence Kaufman

Terrence Kaufman (born 1937) is an American linguist specializing in documentation of unwritten languages, lexicography, Mesoamerican historical linguistics and language contact phenomena. He is emeritus professor of the department of anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh.

Kaufman received his PhD in Linguistics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1963. Kaufman has produced descriptive and comparative-historical studies of languages of the Mayan, Siouan, Hokan, Uto-Aztecan, Mixe–Zoquean and Oto-Manguean families.

Probably because of his focus on gathering empirical documentation of unwritten languages through fieldwork and training of native linguists, Kaufman's list of publications is less extensive than those of other scholars in the field. Nevertheless, many of his articles, often coauthored with other scholars such as Lyle Campbell, Sarah Thomason and John Justeson, have been highly influential.

In a 1976 paper coauthored with Lyle Campbell, he advanced a theory that the Olmecs spoke a Mixe–Zoquean language, based on the substantial presence of early Mixe–Zoquean loans in many Mesoamerican languages, particularly from specific, culturally significant semantic domains. This theory has come to be widely accepted, and is often cited as quasi-fact. Along with Lyle Campbell and Thomas Smith-Stark, Kaufman carried out research published in Language (1986) which led to the recognition of Mesoamerica as a linguistic area.

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