Thinkers Timeline

Avram Noam Chomsky (born 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher, and political commentator whose work has changed the study of language and who has also become one of the most widely known political writers of his generation. He was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Jewish immigrant parents from Ukraine and Belarus. His father was a respected Hebrew scholar who taught his children to love language and books. Noam began writing about international affairs at the age of ten, in a school newspaper article about the rise of fascism in Spain. He entered the University of Pennsylvania at sixteen and studied linguistics, mathematics, and philosophy. His teacher Zellig Harris introduced him to structural linguistics and also to radical politics. In 1955 Chomsky joined the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he remained for more than fifty years. His 1957 book Syntactic Structures changed the field of linguistics almost overnight. His ideas about how the human mind makes language possible started what is now called the cognitive revolution. From the 1960s onwards, he became as well known for his political writings as for his linguistics. He was an early and persistent critic of the Vietnam War. In 1967 he published an influential essay called The Responsibility of Intellectuals, in which he argued that educated people have a duty to tell the truth about what their governments do. He has written dozens of books on language and dozens more on politics, power, and the media. He has been arrested several times for protesting against war. In 1988 he co-wrote Manufacturing Consent with Edward Herman, a book about how mainstream media serve established power. He is one of the most cited living scholars in several fields. Some colleagues treat him as a hero; others criticise his linguistic theories, his political views, or both. His productivity has continued into his nineties. He now holds a chair at the University of Arizona.

Deborah Tannen (born 1945) is an American linguist who has become one of the most widely read scholars of how people talk to each other. She studies what linguists call conversation analysis and sociolinguistics — fields that look at language as people actually use it in daily life. She was born in Brooklyn, New York, to a Hasidic Jewish family. Her parents had emigrated from Poland before the Second World War, and many members of her wider family died in the Holocaust. This family history would later shape some of her thinking about how people from different backgrounds understand each other. She studied English literature at Harpur College and earned a master's degree at Wayne State University. In her thirties she began studying linguistics, completing her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1979 under the supervision of Robin Lakoff, a pioneer in research on language and gender. In 1979 she joined Georgetown University, where she has remained for her whole career, becoming one of the most respected scholars in her field. Her 1990 book You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation changed public understanding of gender and language. It stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for four years and sold millions of copies in thirty languages. It was followed by many other books written for general readers, including Talking from 9 to 5 (1994) on workplace conversation, You're Wearing That? (2006) on mothers and daughters, and You Were Always Mom's Favorite! (2009) on sisters. She has also written academic books like Conversational Style (1984) and Talking Voices (1989) for fellow scholars. This combination — serious academic work and books that millions of ordinary readers buy — is unusual and has produced some tension with colleagues. Some linguists think her popular books oversimplify. Others defend her for bringing linguistic insights to audiences who would never read an academic journal. She remains one of the very few American linguists whose name is widely known outside the field.