George W. Grace

George William Grace (September 8, 1921 – January 17, 2015) was an American ethnolinguist and anthropologist, best known for his contributions to the historical and comparative study of the Oceanic languages of Melanesia. In 1961, he helped found the academic journal Oceanic Linguistics and served as its first editor-in-chief for thirty years. He is considered to be one of the most important figures in the study of the Oceanic languages' histories and interrelationships.

Born in Corinth, Mississippi, Grace grew up on the state's Gulf Coast and initially studied music in college. In 1942, he joined the Army Air Corps following the attack on Pearl Harbor, serving as a flight navigator with the 304th Troop Carrier Squadron. After the war, he settled in Switzerland to study French, German, and political science at the University of Geneva. With Joseph Greenberg as his doctoral advisor, Grace completed his PhD in anthropology from Columbia University in 1958, though Isidore Dyen attempted to thwart the defense. His thesis was later published which met with immensely positive critical reception and became a touchstone for Austronesian linguistics. After five years teaching in the North Carolina and Illinois, he accepted a full professorship from the University of Hawaiʻi, where he remained until his retirement in 1991.

Grace's work touched on a number of subfields, but focused largely on the interaction of synchronic and diachronic analyses, and how linguistic phylogeny can be obfuscated by different kinds of sound changes. He dismissed earlier attempts at phylogenetic research which focused largely on lexicostatistics, which he believed was subordinate to sound change and led to his promulgation of the "aberrant–exemplary" distinction to describe the concept. Grace was also recognized for his work on the philosophy of language, especially on translation studies and the nature of language as a message rather than as a code.