Larry Selinker

Larry Selinker is an American applied linguist best known for coining the term interlanguage in his 1972 paper of the same name. He taught for many years at the University of Michigan and later at Birkbeck, University of London, and has worked across continents in a long career shaped by the single idea that made his name.

Selinker's move was conceptually simple and historically large. By arguing that learner language is a system in its own right — not a faulty version of the target — he gave the nascent field of SLA its basic object of study. Nearly everything that followed, from developmental sequences to Processability Theory, depends on the move he made in 1972.

Career

• PhD in Linguistics from Georgetown University
• Long tenure at the University of Michigan
• Later Visiting Professor at Birkbeck, University of London
• Co-founded the Second Language Research journal

Published Work

• "Interlanguage" (1972) — the field-defining paper
• Rediscovering Interlanguage (1992)
• Second Language Acquisition: An Introductory Course (with Susan Gass, later editions with Behney and Plonsky)

Influence

• Gave the field its central construct: learner language as a legitimate linguistic system
• Laid the groundwork for research on fossilization, transfer, and developmental patterns
• Through his textbook with Gass, shaped how generations of graduate students first encounter SLA