Sarah Thomason

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.

Sarah Thomason is also known for her contributions to the study of Native American languages. Thomason's interest in these languages started with her studies on pidgin languages, specifically pidgin Delaware, derived from Delaware languages, and Chinook jargon. She would later become very interested on Salishan languages, a field that she has been studying for over thirty years. She has spent every summer since 1980 studying Montana Salish, or Salish-Pend d'Oreille language, talking with its last fluent speakers with the objective of documenting the language, as well as creating a dictionary for the Salish and Pend d'Oreille Culture Committee language program, compiling a dictionary and materials for the Salish-Pend d'Oreille language program.

Thomason had a great interest on learning how to do fieldwork about 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 would spend a year in this region writing her dissertation project on noun suffixation in Serbo-Croatian dialectology. Thomason would not, however, continue focusing on either Slavic or on Indo-European languages. Instead, Thomason's career's focus shifted in 1974, when she encountered literature about pidgins and creoles. She realized that language contact was crucial for an understanding of language change. Since then, Thomason has dedicated the vast majority of her work to language contact phenomena.

Sarah Thomason received a B.A. in German from Stanford University in 1961. While studying this B.A., she had the opportunity to study a course in linguistics. This course would eventually lead her to do her application for graduation work in linguistics, when she was nominated for the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation program. She would later turn down this fellowship. Thomason decided to dedicate herself to linguistics and, after spending a year in Germany mastering the language, she was re-awarded the Fellowship and was admitted into Yale University, where she completed both an M.A. in 1965 and a Ph.D. in 1968 in linguistics. She taught Slavic Linguistics at Yale from 1968 to 1971, before moving to the University of Pittsburgh in 1972. She was named the William J. Gedney Collegiate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Michigan in 1999, and received the highest honor granted by the University of Michigan to its faculty by being named the Bernard Bloch Distinguished University Professor of Linguistics in 2016. She was also Chair of the Department of Linguistics from 2010 to 2013.