S. Robert Ramsey

Samuel Robert Ramsey Jr. (born 1941) is an American linguist. He specializes in the linguistics of East Asian languages, especially Korean and Japanese. He is professor emeritus of East Asian linguistics at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he also served as chair of the Department of Asian and East European Languages and Cultures. He is considered to be a significant Western academic on Korean linguistics. Ramsey is the author of The Languages of China and co-author of A History of the Korean Language (2011).

Biography Ramsey first encountered the Korean language when he was dispatched to South Korea in 1966 as part of the Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC). Ramsey received a Bachelor of Civil Engineering degree from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1966. After graduating from Georgia Tech, Ramsey served as an officer in the United States Army Ordnance Corps from 1966 to 1968.

After military service, Ramsey studied Korean at the Korean Language Institute of Yonsei University, followed by a year of Mandarin Chinese at Taiwan Normal University. He received his Ph.D. in linguistics from Yale University in 1975. From 1975 to 1984, he taught at Columbia University. He has also taught at the University of Pennsylvania. He received three Fulbright Scholarships throughout his career, including fellowships at Seoul National University (1972–1974) and Kyoto University (1978–1979). In 1998, he received a from South Korean president Kim Dae-jung for service to the study of the Korean language . The Korean Language (with Iksop Lee, State University of New York Press, 2000) A History of the Korean Language (with Ki-Moon Lee, Cambridge University Press, 2011) "The Japanese and Their Language: How the Japanese Made Their Language and It Made Them" (Sino-Platonic Papers, No. 372, December 2025)