Martha Ratliff

Martha Ratliff is an American linguist and Professor Emerita at Wayne State University. She is a leading specialist in Hmong–Mien languages and also notable for her reconstruction of Proto-Hmong–Mien.

Ratliff earned a B.A. in English from Carleton College in 1968, an M.A.T. in English Education from University of Chicago in 1970, and a Ph.D. in Linguistics from University of Chicago in 1986, with a dissertation entitled The Morphological Functions of Tone in White Hmong.

She currently serves as an associate editor for the historical linguistics journal Diachronica. She is co-founder of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society along with Eric Schiller.

Publications

Manuscript.

Newman, Paul and Martha Ratliff. 2001. Linguistic Fieldwork. Cambridge University Press. 玛莎·拉特利夫 [Martha Ratliff] (2019). Miao Yao yuyan lishi yanjiu [苗瑶语言历史研究]. Beijing: China Social Sciences Press. (Chinese translation of Ratliff's 2010 book, Hmong-Mien language history)