David Adger FBA[1] (born 23 September 1967) is a Professor of Linguistics at Queen Mary University of London.

[3] At the age of eleven Adger became fascinated by language, reading Ursula K. Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea.

[4] At the age of sixteen, Adger won a school competition coordinated by the University of St Andrews and spent the money on copies of Noam Chomsky's Aspects of the Theory of Syntax.

[10] He visited the University of Maryland, College Park in 2016, where he delivered a series of lectures discussing minimalist syntax, semantics and merge.

[13] Adger has created fictional languages for several television productions, including Beowulf: Return to the Shieldlands and Nautilus.