William Hubbard Baxter III (born March 3, 1949) is an American linguist specializing in the history of the Chinese language and best known for his work on the reconstruction on Old Chinese.
Baxter earned his Ph.D. in Linguistics in 1977 at Cornell University.
In 1983, he joined the University of Michigan,[1] where he is currently Professor of Linguistics and Asian Languages and Cultures.
Together with Laurent Sagart at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris, he has produced an improved reconstruction of the pronunciation, vocabulary, and morphology of Old Chinese.
[4] In 2016, Baxter and Sagart were awarded the Leonard Bloomfield Book Award by the Linguistic Society of America for their 2014 book Old Chinese: A New Reconstruction.