Kenneth E. Naylor, Jr. (February 27, 1937 – March 10, 1992) was an American linguist and Slavist, one of the leading experts on Serbo-Croatian and South Slavic languages in general.
In 1990, he testified before the United States House of Representatives, Foreign Affairs Committee, on ethnic rivalry in Yugoslavia and the development of the Serbo-Croatian language.
The overwhelming majority of his 100-plus articles, reviews, and edited works focused on Serbo-Croatian and Balkan linguistics, with several notable and much quoted ones among them.
In his honor, the Kenneth E. Naylor Professorship of South Slavic Linguistics was created officially on November 5, 1993 at The Ohio State University.
The second publication in this series came in 2000, when Ronelle Alexander, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley, refining and augmenting her 1999 Naylor Lecture, In Honor of Diversity: The Linguistic Resources of the Balkans, turned it into a detailed overview of Balkan Slavic dialectology, together with a fifty-page bibliography of relevant works.