Robert Lawrence "Larry" Trask (November 10, 1944 - March 27, 2004) was a linguist.

Born in upstate New York, USA, he initially studied chemistry in his home country, but after a brief stint in the Peace Corps he took an interest in linguistics. He received his PhD in linguistics from the University of London, and thereafter taught at various universities in the United Kingdom. He became a professor of linguistics at the University of Sussex.

He was an authority on the Basque language, and was at work compiling an etymological dictionary of that language when he died. He was also an authority on historical linguistics, and had written about the problem of the origin of language; he had also published a popular introduction to linguistics. He was awarded a Leverhulme Fellowship to pursue his research.

His books include:

• Historical Linguistics (1996), ISBN 0340607580
• The history of Basque, London (1997), ISBN 0-415-13116-2
• Introducing Linguistics by R L Trask and Bill Mayblin. (2000), ISBN 1840461691
• The Penguin Dictionary of English Grammar (2000), ISBN 0140514643
• Time Depth in Historical Linguistics (co-editor) (2000), ISBN 1902937066

External links

• Homepage at the University of Sussex
• Interview with The Guardian
• Posts by Larry Trask on the sci.lang usenet newsgroup from Google archive.
• Contributions to Ask-a-Linguist
• Larry Trask's review of The Atoms of Language: The Mind’s Hidden Rules of Grammar by Mark C. Baker