Samuel Robert Ramsey Jr. [a] (born 1941 [b] ) is an American linguist. He specializes in the linguistics of East Asian languages, especially Korean and Japanese. He is a professor of East Asian linguistics at the University of Maryland, College Park. [3] He is considered to be a significant Western academic on Korean linguistics. [4]
Ramsey first encountered the Korean language when he was dispatched to South Korea in 1966 as part of the Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC). [5] [6] He received his Ph.D. in linguistics from Yale University in 1975. His thesis is entitled Accent and Morphology in Korean Dialects and his advisor was Samuel E. Martin. [1] From 1975 to 1984, he taught at Columbia University. [7] He received three Fulbright Scholarships throughout his career. [7]
Ramsey researched the historical Gyeongsang and Hamgyŏng dialects. [8] In 1998, he received a Presidential Commendation from South Korean president Kim Dae-jung for service to the study of the Korean language (대한민국 한글유공자 대통령 표창). [9] [7]
In 2011, Ramsey and Ki-Moon Lee published A History of the Korean Language . [10] [5]