Robert Lawrence Trask (10 November 1944 – 27 March 2004) was an American-British professor of linguistics at the University of Sussex, and an authority on the Basque language and the field of historical linguistics.

Born in Olean, New York, he initially studied chemistry in his home country, but – after a brief stint in the Peace Corps – he took an interest in linguistics.

He was at work compiling an etymological dictionary of that language when he died; the unfinished work was posthumously published on the Internet by Max W.

[1] He was also an authority on historical linguistics, and had written about the problem of the origin of language.

Trask died on 27 March 2004 as a result of complications from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), aged 59.