Robert Hale Ives Goddard III (born 1941) is a linguist and a curator emeritus in the Department of Anthropology of the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution.
After earning his doctorate, Goddard taught for several years at Harvard as a junior professor.
His own field research in linguistics has concentrated on the Delaware languages and Meskwaki (Fox).
He has also published on the history of the Arapahoan branch of Algonquian: its two current lines that are extant are Arapaho and Gros Ventre, spoken by tribal members in the West.
He has played a significant role in critiquing crank historical linguistic work.