R. L. Trask
American linguist (1944–2004)
Robert Lawrence Trask (10 November 1944 – 27 March 2004) was an American-British professor of linguistics at the University of Sussex, and an authority on the Basque language and the field of historical linguistics.
Biography
Trask was born on 10 November 1944 in Olean, New York. He studied chemistry at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the United States, and received his first degree. He got a master's degree from Brandeis University before joining the Peace Corps. In the Peace Corps, he taught at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey, before leaving the country in 1970. He later received his doctorate in linguistics from the University of London, and afterwards taught at various universities in the United Kingdom. He became a professor of linguistics at the University of Sussex in 1988.
He was considered an authority on the Basque language. His book The History of Basque (1997) is considered an essential reference on diachronic Basque linguistics and a standard introduction to Basque linguistics. At the time of his death, he was attempting to compile an etymological dictionary of the Basque language; the unfinished work was posthumously published on the Internet by Max W. Wheeler.
The public source identifies “R. L. Trask” as american linguist (1944–2004). This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Trask, American and linguist.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2499834. VIAF identifies the subject as 67598491. The Library of Congress control number is n92069612. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1944, 2004, 1970 and 1988.
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This entry incorporates text from “R. L. Trask” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.