François Marie Savina

François Marie Savina (20 March 1876 – 23 July 1941[1]) was a Frenchman who worked as a Catholic priest and as an anthropologist.

[3] Charles Keith, author of Catholic Vietnam: A Church from Empire to Nation, wrote that Savina was "[t]he most notable" missionary ethnographer of Southeast Asia of his era.

Beginning in 1925 he worked as an ethnographic field research representative of the École française d'Extrême-Orient (EFEO).

During that assignment he was based in Hainan and made frequent trips to Hong Kong, where he interacted with a printing house of the MEP.

[1] Savina collected his own data to build eight dictionaries of languages of Southeast Asia, including those in highland and lowland areas.

[3] Savina's publications discuss the Ao, Be, Chinese, Day, Hiai, Hoklo, Miao, Nung, Tay, and Vietnamese languages.