William Poser
Linguist, Native American and Athabaskan languages
William John Poser is a Canadian-American linguist who is known for his extensive work with the historical linguistics of Native American languages, especially those of the Athabascan family.
He got his B.A. from Harvard in 1979 and his Ph.D. from MIT in 1985, his dissertation being about suprasegmental phenomena in the phonology of Japanese. He then taught at Stanford, and then at the University of Northern British Columbia. He has published extensively about the Carrier language in which he has done ample fieldwork. He is also known as a frequent blogger at the Language Log.
Selected publications
Poser, William J. (1998) Nak'albun/Dzinghubun Whut'enne Bughuni (Stuart/Trembleur Lake Carrier Lexicon). Vanderhoof, BC: Yinka Dene Language Institute. Second edition.
Poser, William J. (2000) Saik'uz Whut'en Hubughunek (Stoney Creek Carrier Lexicon). Vanderhoof, BC: Saik'uz First Nation.
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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 Jun 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q8017023. VIAF identifies the subject as 110293827. The Library of Congress control number is n88611302. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1979, 1985, 1998 and 2000.
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This entry incorporates text from “William Poser” 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.