Sarah Grey Thomason (known as "Sally") is an American scholar of linguistics, Bernard Bloch distinguished professor emerita at the University of Michigan.

She also has an interest in debunking linguistic pseudoscience, and has collaborated with publications such as the Skeptical Inquirer, The Encyclopedia of the Paranormal and American Speech, in regard to claims of xenoglossy.

This course would eventually lead her to do her application for graduation work in linguistics, when she was nominated for the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation program.

Thomason decided to dedicate herself to linguistics and, after spending a year in Germany mastering the language, she was re-awarded the Fellowship and was admitted into Yale University, where she completed both an M.A.

She traveled to the former Yugoslavia and started preparing her project on Serbo-Croatian, with the intention of focusing her career on Slavic studies.

Thomason would spend a year in this region writing her dissertation project on noun suffixation in Serbo-Croatian dialectology.

Sarah Thomason, however, analyzed those cases and concluded that the subjects did not show real knowledge of the foreign language they said they were able to speak.

Thomason pointed out that the performance of the individuals was by far not to the standards of that of a native speaker, as they showed very limited vocabulary and poor grammar in the foreign language.

Thomason also noticed that the speech produced was many times limited to a repetition of some phrases or short answers, and it sometimes included words in a different language than the one subjects claimed to be able to speak.

[9] Thomason is a prolific contributor to academic journals and publications specializing in the field of linguistics, as well as a guest lecturer at different universities around the world and a speaker at international conferences.