Michael David Fortescue (born 8 August 1946, Thornbury[1]) is a British-born[2] linguist specializing in Arctic and native North American languages, including Kalaallisut, Inuktun, Chukchi and Nitinaht.
As a young teenager, Michael Fortescue and his family moved to California where he went to La Jolla High School 1956-1959.
with "Honours with great Distinction" in Slavic languages and literatures from University of California, Berkeley, where he then taught Russian 1968-1970 and finished an M.A.
In the years 1971-1975 he taught English for the International Language Centre in Osaka and the University of Aix/Marseille.
[3] He took a PhD in Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh 1975-1978[5] with the thesis Procedural discourse generation model for 'Twenty Questions'.