LINGUISTS from China

Top 2

The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the most legendary Chinese Linguists of all time. This list of famous Chinese Linguists is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography’s online popularity.

1. Mahmud al-Kashgari (1029 - 1101)

With an HPI of 71.32, Mahmud al-Kashgari is the most famous Chinese Linguist.  His biography has been translated into 41 different languages on wikipedia.

Mahmud ibn Husayn ibn Muhammad al-Kashgari was an 11th-century Kara-Khanid scholar and lexicographer of the Turkic languages from Kashgar. His father, Husayn, was the mayor of Barsgan, a town in the southeastern part of the lake of Issyk-Kul (nowadays village of Barskoon in Northern Kyrgyzstan's Issyk-Kul Region) and related to the ruling dynasty of Kara-Khanid Khanate. Around 1057 C.E., Mahmud al-Kashgari became a political refugee, before settling down in Baghdad.

2. Yuen Ren Chao (1892 - 1982)

With an HPI of 51.62, Yuen Ren Chao is the 2nd most famous Chinese Linguist.  His biography has been translated into 23 different languages.

Yuen Ren Chao (3 November 1892 – 25 February 1982), also known as Zhao Yuanren, was a Chinese-American linguist, educator, scholar, poet, and composer, who contributed to the modern study of Chinese phonology and grammar. Chao was born and raised in China, then attended university in the United States, where he earned degrees from Cornell University and Harvard University. A naturally gifted polyglot and linguist, his Mandarin Primer was one of the most widely used Mandarin Chinese textbooks in the 20th century. He invented the Gwoyeu Romatzyh romanization scheme, which, unlike pinyin and other romanization systems, transcribes Mandarin Chinese pronunciation without diacritics or numbers to indicate tones.