William Leap

William Leap, also known as Bill Leap, is a professor of anthropology at American University who works in the field of gay and lesbian linguistics. He teaches courses about neoliberalism, critical discourse analysis, language, and human behavior.

William Leap earned his bachelor's degree from Florida State University in 1967 and his Ph.D. from Southern Methodist University in 1970. His dissertation advisor was George Trager.

Leap has been openly gay since he began teaching at American University in Washington, D.C. in 1970. Leap is a leading academic in Lavender linguistics and has been a recipient of the American Anthropological Association Ruth Benedict Award for publishing in Gay and Lesbian anthropology in 1996, 2003, and 2009. He founded the annual Lavender Languages & Linguistics conference in 1993 to coincide with the March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation. In 2012, he launched The Journal of Language and Sexuality with Heiko Motschenbacher. He has been a member of the American Anthropological Association's AIDS task force. He has done research among Native Americans of the Southwest U.S., South Africans, and Gay men in Washington, DC. He was one of the first researchers to study American Indian Pidgin English in the same way that others had studied Black English, and he has been prominent in Indian language revitalization projects.