Wolf Leslau (Yiddish: וולף לסלאו; born November 14, 1906, in Krzepice, Vistula Land, Poland; died November 18, 2006, in Fullerton, California) was a scholar of Semitic languages and one of the foremost authorities on Semitic languages of Ethiopia.

[1] When he was a child his family was very poor, and after contracting tuberculosis he usually had to keep a thermometer with him to monitor his body temperature, although the reasons for this are unknown.

[4] Leslau was arrested by the French police and sent to an internment camp in the Pyrenees where he spent the harsh winter of 1939-1940 with his wife and child.

[7] He settled in New York City, and received a Guggenheim Fellowship[8] to continue his studies of the Semitic languages in Ethiopia.

[4] Leslau specialized in previously unrecorded and unstudied Semitic languages of Ethiopia.

There he made field recordings at gatherings of South Arabian Bedouins and Yemenite Jews.