George Nickerson Clements (October 5, 1940 – August 30, 2009) was an American linguist specializing in phonology.
Clements was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and educated in New Haven, Paris and London.
He received his Ph.D. from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, in 1973, defending a thesis on the Ewe language based on a year of field work in Ghana.
(1973–75) and held appointments as professor at Harvard (1975–82) and Cornell (1982–91) before moving to the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (C.N.R.S.)
[2] At the time of his death, his work was concerned with the principles underlying speech sound inventories across languages (Clements & Ridouane 2011).