Sarah Thomason

Sarah "Sally" Thomason (; born 1939) is an American scholar of linguistics, Bernard Bloch distinguished professor emerita at the University of Michigan. She is best known for her work on language contact, historical linguistics, pidgins and creoles, Slavic Linguistics, Native American languages and typological universals. She also has an interest in debunking linguistic pseudoscience, and has collaborated with publications such as the Skeptical Inquirer, The Encyclopedia of the Paranormal and American Speech, in regard to claims of xenoglossy. Career

Early career Sarah Thomason received a B.A. in German from Stanford University in 1961. She taught Slavic Linguistics at Yale from 1968 to 1971, before moving to the University of Pittsburgh in 1972.

Thomason was interested in learning how to do fieldwork on the Indo-European languages. She decided that Indo-European languages from Eastern Europe would be best suited for research as Western European languages had been already thoroughly studied and the literature was vast. She traveled to the former Yugoslavia and started preparing her project on Serbo-Croatian, with the intention of focusing her career on Slavic studies. Thomason spent a year in this region writing her dissertation project on noun suffixation in Serbo-Croatian dialectology. Thomason did not, however, continue focusing on either Slavic or on Indo-European languages.

Thomason has argued that language change could be a product of deliberate action driven by its speakers, who may consciously create dramatic changes in their usage, if strong motivation is present.

Thomason has also criticized alleged cases of xenoglossy from a professional point of view as a linguist. Her article Past tongues remembered? has been reprinted in different publications and translated into French and German. Thomason has examined, among others, the cases presented by author Ian Stevenson. In Stevenson's works Xenoglossy: A Review and Report of A Case, and Unlearned Language: New Studies in Xenoglossy, he presents the case studies of subjects who claimed to remember having lived past lives and to be able to speak in a foreign language when they were under hypnosis. In Stevenson's opinion, their ability to speak a foreign language without having been exposed to it could be proof of reincarnation. Thomason, however, analyzed those cases and concluded that the subjects did not show real knowledge of the foreign language they said they were able to speak. Thomason pointed out that the performance of the individuals was by far not to the standards of that of a native speaker, as they showed very limited vocabulary and poor grammar in the foreign language. Thomason also noticed that the speech produced was many times limited to a repetition of some phrases or short answers, and it sometimes included words in a different language than the one subjects claimed to be able to speak. Thomason argues that the structure of the experiment allowed for the subjects to be able to guess the meaning of some of the questions by the hypnotists. She concludes that none of the individuals studied by Stevenson could prove xenoglossy, and that their knowledge of the foreign language could be explained by a combination of natural means such as exposure to the language, use of cognates, and guesses, amongst other resources.

She is one of the Language Log bloggers.

Honors Thomason has been a regular contributor to academic journals and publications specializing in the field of linguistics, as well as a guest lecturer at different universities around the world and a speaker at international conferences. and, in 2009, she served as President of the LSA. In 2000, she was President of the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas. as well as part of the advisory board of the Journal of Language Contact.

Personal She is married to the philosopher and computer scientist Richmond Thomason and is the mother of the linguist Lucy Thomason. Her mother was the ichthyologist Marion Griswold Grey.

Selected works Thomason, Sarah G. and Terrence Kaufman (1988). Language contact, creolization, and genetic linguistics. Berkeley: University of California Press. . Thomason, Sarah G. (2001). Language contact: an introduction. Georgetown University Press, 2001. Thomason, Sarah G. (2015). Endangered Languages: An Introduction. Cambridge University Press, 2015. Thomason, Sarah G. (1987) Past tongues remembered? The Skeptical Inquirer. Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. 11:367-75 Thomason, Sarah G. (1984) Do you remember your previous life's language in your present incarnation?. American Speech. Duke University Press. 59:340-350.