Hans Christian Aarsleff (born 19 July 1925) is a Danish linguist and academic, who has served as emeritus professor of English at Princeton University since 1997.

Aarsleff also contributed a number of entries to Charles C. Gillispie’s “The Dictionary of Scientific Biography”, among which are major essays on John Wilkins and Thomas Sprat.

This resulted in a festschrift “La linguistique entre mythe et histoire”, edited by Daniel Droixhe and Chantal Grell (Münster: Nodus, 1993).

This article drew much attention as it was an attack on Noam Chomsky's much publicized work of the preceding years in the history of linguistics, contending that it was based on deficient and partisan scholarship.

Although major specialists in the field were of the same opinion,[11][12] the fierce and vilifying reactions by Chomsky and his followers[13] made Aarsleff a controversial figure among Chomskyan theoretical linguists.