Robert L. Rankin (1939-2014) was Professor of Linguistics at the University of Kansas. He earned his Ph.D. in 1972 from the University of Chicago, and devoted most of his scholarly effort to diachronic and descriptive work in Siouan, Muskogean, Romance and Slavic. He was the major contributor to the Comparative Siouan Dictionary (available on line from the Max Planck Institute for Applied Anthropology in Leipzig). He authored or co-authored over 50 books and articles on Siouan topics, many of them never published.
