author
John U. Wolff
A longtime Cornell linguist, he is best known for work on Indonesian, Cebuano, and other Austronesian languages. His books and dictionaries helped generations of students and researchers engage more deeply with Southeast Asian languages.
1 Audiobook
A Dictionary of Cebuano Visayan
by John U. Wolff
About the author
John U. Wolff is a linguist and Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and Asian Studies at Cornell University. Cornell faculty pages describe his research interests as historical linguistics, lexicography, and Austronesian linguistics, with a strong focus on Southeast Asian languages.
His published work includes teaching materials for Indonesian and a major Cebuano-Visayan Dictionary, along with scholarship on language history, plant names in Proto-Austronesian, and Javanese communicative codes. Across that work, he built a reputation for careful description of language and for making difficult material genuinely usable.
A biographical profile from BASAbali says he was born in Berlin in 1932, studied at Cornell and Yale, and later served as director of Cornell's Southeast Asia Program from 1993 to 1998. Taken together, these sources show a career devoted both to scholarship and to widening access to the languages of Southeast Asia.