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James A. Matisoff (born July 14, 1937) is a professor emeritus of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley and noted authority on Tibeto-Burman languages and other languages of mainland Southeast Asia.

Matisoff was born July 14, 1937 in Boston, Massachusetts to a working-class family. He attended Harvard from 1954 to 1959 and received a degree in Romance Languages and Literatures (A.B.) in 1958 and a degree in French Literature (A.M.) in 1959. After studying Japanese at International Christian University for one year (1960-1961), he returned to Harvard to study linguistics. He was not satisfied with the linguistics program at Harvard and opted to transfer to the University of California, Berkeley, where he completed his PhD in Linguistics in 1967.

Matisoff's doctoral dissertation was a grammar of the Lahu language, a Tibeto-Burman language belonging to the Loloish branch of the Lolo-Burmese family. He spent a year doing field work on Lahu during his graduate studies and made several field studies thereafter. His Grammar of Lahu was notable both for its depth of detail and the theoretical eccleticism which informed his description of the language.

After four years teaching at Columbia University (1966-1969), Matisoff accepted a professorship at Berkeley, where he remained until his retirement in 2001.

During his time at Berkeley, Matisoff founded and directed the Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus (STEDT) project, a long running project aimed at producing an etymological dictionary of Sino-Tibetan organized by semantic field.

The term Cheshirisation, coined by Matisoff, refers to the Cheshire Cat, a character in the book Alice in Wonderland, who has the ability to disappear. The last thing that remains visible is his smile. Although not an established scientific term, the word Cheshirisation can help to describe a linguistic phenomenon where the sound of part of a word is lost due to language change. However, before disappearing this sound triggers some phonetic changes in its vicinity or prevents them. These phonetic changes would be the Cheshire smile. Examples are the umlaut in Germanic languages (a lost i or j triggers fronting), initial mutations in Celtic (a lost vowel triggers lenition, a lost nasal triggers nasalisation), Lahu (a lost consonant prevents sound change) or the tone split in Chinese (a voiced consonant triggers a low tone and is subsequently devoiced).

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• Personal page at the STEDT project website
• Faculty page at the UC Berkeley Department of Linguistics
• STEDT project page