Royal Jon Skousen[1] (/ˈskaʊsən/; born August 5, 1945)[2] is an American linguist and retired professor of linguistics and English at Brigham Young University (BYU), where he is editor of the Book of Mormon Critical Text Project.

Skousen went on to study linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, earning his Ph.D. degree there in 1972.

Skousen was an assistant professor of linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin from the earning of his PhD until 1979, when he joined the faculty of BYU.

He was also a visiting professor at the University of California, San Diego in 1981, a Fulbright lecturer at the University of Tampere in Finland in 1982, and a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, Netherlands, in 2001.

[2] In 1999, BYU presented him the Karl G. Maeser Excellence in Research and Creative Arts Awards.