William Poser is a Canadian-American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 linguist who is known for his extensive work with the historical linguistics

Historical linguistics

Historical linguistics is the study of language change. It has five main concerns:* to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages...

 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 language

Japanese language

is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...

. He then taught at Stanford, and then at the University of British Columbia

University of British Columbia

The University of British Columbia is a public research university. UBC’s two main campuses are situated in Vancouver and in Kelowna in the Okanagan Valley...

. He has published extensively about the Carrier language

Carrier language

The Carrier language is a Northern Athabaskan language. It is named after the Dakelh people, a First Nations people of the Central Interior of British Columbia, Canada, for whom Carrier is the usual English name. People who are referred to as Carrier speak two related languages. One,...

 in which he has done ample fieldwork. He is also known as a frequent blogger at the Language Log

Language Log

Language Log is a collaborative language blog maintained by University of Pennsylvania phonetician Mark Liberman.The site is updated daily at the whims of the contributors, and most of the posts are on language use in the media and popular culture. Google search results are frequently used as a...

.

Partial Bibliography

• 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. Fourth edition. (March 2000)
• Poser, William J. (2005) "Noun Classification in Carrier". Anthropological Linguistics 47.2.143-168. prepublication version
• Poser, William J. (2009) The Carrier Language: a Brief Introduction. Prince George, British Columbia: College of New Caledonia Press. ISBN 978-0-921087-45-8.