Gerhard Doerfer (8 March 1920 – 27 December 2003) was a German Turkologist, Altaicist, and philologist best known for his studies of the Turkic languages, especially Khalaj.
He took courses in Turkic and Altaic languages under the guidance of Karl Heinrich Menges, as well as Islamic and Iranian Studies.
In 1970 Doerfer was appointed a full professor of Turkic and Altaic Studies at the University of Göttingen.
In his extensive and multi-faceted studies, Doerfer investigated Mongolian and Turkic elements in Persian language, culture, and folklore, wrote his four-volume Türkische und mongolische Elemente im Neupersischen (1963–75), and contributed greatly to the study of Persian-Turkic language contacts (1967).
He argued that the words and features shared by Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic were cultural borrowings, and that any other similarities should be attributed to chance resemblances.