John D. Bengtson (1948-2024) was an American historical and anthropological linguist.
[1][2] He had been president and vice-president of the Association for the Study of Language in Prehistory, and had served as editor (or co-editor) of the journal Mother Tongue (1996–2003, 2007–2024).
[3] Since 2001 he had been a member/researcher of Evolution of Human Languages,[4] an international project on the linguistic prehistory of humanity coordinated by the Santa Fe Institute.
His areas of specialization included Scandinavian languages and linguistics, Indo-European linguistics, Dené–Caucasian (Sino-Caucasian) languages, and paleolinguistics (the study of human prehistory through linguistic evidence).
[5]