The history of linguistics in the United States begins with William Dwight Whitney, the first U.S.-taught academic linguist, who founded the American Philological Association in 1869.
Leonard Bloomfield (1878–1949), professor at the University of Chicago from 1921, founded the Linguistic Society of America in 1924. Other linguists active in the first half of the 20th century include Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf.
From the 1950s, American linguistic tradition began to diverge from the de Saussurian structuralism taught in European academia, notably with Noam Chomsky's "nativist" transformational grammar and successor theories, which during the 1970s "Linguistics Wars" and the heyday of postmodernism gave rise to a bewildering variety of competing grammar frameworks.
American linguistics outside the Chomskyan tradition includes functional grammar with proponents including Talmy Givón, and cognitive grammar advocated by Ronald Langacker and others.
linguistic typology: controversially mass lexical comparison by Joseph Greenberg.
Historical linguistics, especially Indo-European studies, is taught at Harvard, UCLA and Austin, Texas.
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“Of all the errors which can possibly be committed to the education of youth, that of sending them to Europe is the most fatal. I see [clearly] that no American should come to Europe under 30 years of age.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)