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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, and Creole languages, 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.
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. Instead, Thomason's career focus shifted in 1974, when she encountered literature about and Creole language. She realized that language contact was crucial for an understanding of language change. Since then, the vast majority of Thomason's work focuses on language contact phenomena.
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. This view challenges the current assumption in historical linguistics that, on one hand, deliberate language change can only produce minor changes to a language, and, on the other, that an individual on his or her own is not able to produce language change. While she admits that the permanence of the change is dependent on social and linguistic probability, she emphasizes these factors do not invalidate the possibility of permanent change occurring. Thomason argues that under a situation of language contact bilingual speakers can adapt loanwords to their language structure, and that speakers are also capable of rejecting changes to the structure of their language. Both of these cases show conscious and deliberate actions from the part of the speakers to change their language.
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 language and German language. 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.
From 1988 to 1994, she was the editor of Language, the journal of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA). In 1999, she was the Collitz Professor at the LSA summer institute. In 2006, she was elected a Fellow of the LSA, 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. She was also Chair of the Linguistics and Language Sciences section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1996, and Secretary of the section from 2001 to 2005.
She is currently an associate editor for the Journal of Historical Linguistics, as well as part of the advisory board of the Journal of Language Contact.
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