Diane Brentari

Diane Brentari is an American linguist who specializes in sign languages and American Sign Language in particular.

Education and career Brentari received her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Chicago in 1990. Her dissertation, entitled Theoretical Foundations of American Sign Language Phonology, was supervised by John Goldsmith.

She is the Mary K. Werkman Professor of Linguistics and co-director of the Center for Gesture, Sign, and Language at the University of Chicago. She held a position at University of California-Davis, and then led the Sign Language program at Purdue University before coming to the University of Chicago in 2011. She is also a Distinguished Visiting Professor at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Brentari's research interests address the sign language grammars of Deaf communities—how these languages emerge, and the degree of variation that exists among them. She has analyzed the formal, cognitive, and cultural dimensions that motivate the similarities and differences among these languages. Her work focuses on sign language structure as a way to better understand the flexibility of the human language capacity in constructing spoken and signed languages, as well as the effects of communication mode (or modality) on language. Brentari's scholarship focuses on the phonology, morphology, and prosody of sign languages. Her current research has expanded to include analyses of a new protactile language.

Honors Brentar was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for the project Observing the Creation of Language (2020). Brentari was inducted as a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America in 2022, and she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2024.

Selected publications Books

Chapters and Articles