Sylvester Primer (1842–1912) was an American linguist and philologist known for his pioneering work in 1887 on the dialect of the European-American residents of Charleston, South Carolina.

Primer grew up in western New York state and served with its units in the American Civil War.

Born in Geneva, Wisconsin on December 14, 1842, as the son of Archibald and Eleanor (Jacoby) Primer, Sylvester moved in 1850 as a child with his family to New York.

He went to college, studying languages at Harvard University, where he earned a bachelor's degree in 1874 and was Phi Beta Kappa.

During this period, he first directed scholarly attention toward the unique dialect of the city of Charleston in a paper he delivered at the Modern Language Association of America in 1887.

[2] This pioneering work, "Charleston Provincialisms" (1887), is one of the first attempts by a scholar to describe the speech of an American community.

He became chairman of the School of Romance language and in time, chair of a separate German department established at the university.