John M. Lipski is an American linguist who is most widely known for his work on Spanish and Portuguese dialectology and variation.
Lipski studied Spanish and mathematics as an undergraduate at Rice University (1971).
He has stated, however, in casual conversation during his tenure at the University of Houston in the 1980s that he never took a Spanish class, and that he was self-taught in the language.
This appears to be the case with Portuguese as well, which Lipski has personally referred to as a "free" language of sorts if one already knows Spanish.
His doctoral dissertation was a comparative historical phonology of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese.
He currently works as a professor of Spanish linguistics at the Pennsylvania State University (2000–present), and he is a core faculty member on Penn State's Center for Language Science's[2] National Science Foundation PIRE[3] grant.
El español de Malabo: procesos fonéticos/fonológicos e implicaciones dialectológicas.
The Speech of the Negros Congos of Panama: a Vestigial Afro-Hispanic Creole.