Ronald E. Asher

Ronald Eaton Asher (23 July 1926 – 26 December 2022) was a British linguist and educator specialised in Dravidian languages. He was a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1991) and an honorary fellow of the Sahitya Akademi.

Personal life Asher was born in Gringley-on-the-Hill, Nottinghamshire, England, on 23 July 1926 to Ernest and Doris (Hurst) Asher. He won a scholarship to study at the King Edward VI Grammar School at Retford, Nottinghamshire. He completed his Bachelor of Arts in 1950 and was certified in the phonetics French in 1951 from the University College London. He did doctoral research on 16th-century French literature and received a Ph.D. in 1955 from the University College London.

Asher died on 26 December 2022 at the age of 96.

Career After Asher received his Ph.D., he was offered two lectureships: at The School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London and at the Renaissance French of the University College of North Staffordshire. He opted for SOAS and spent four years at its Department of India, Pakistan and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) under the Department of Linguistics doing linguistic theoretical research in Tamil language.

Asher served as the President of International Association for Tamil Research from 1983 to 1990.

In 2000, he translated Atlas of the World's Languages (1994) into Japanese as Sekai Minzoku Gengo Chizu. In 2002, Asher translated the Malayalam novelist and short-story writer K. P. Ramanunni's debut novel Sufi Paranja Katha, published in 1993, as What the Sufi said with N. Gopalakrishnan. In 2007, the Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Letters, elected Asher as an Honorary fellow. In 2018, Asher was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Edinburgh in recognition of his contributions to linguistics.