George W. Grace

George William Grace (8 September 1921 in Corinth, Mississippi – January 17, 2015) was an emeritus professor of linguistics at the University of Hawaiʻi. He specialized in historical and comparative linguistics, ethnolinguistics, and Austronesian languages, especially the Oceanic languages of Melanesia. He joined the Department of Linguistics in 1964, serving three years as chair (1966–1969) and three decades as editor of Oceanic Linguistics (1962–1991), a journal he founded while teaching anthropology at Southern Illinois University (1960–1964).

Grace was raised on the Gulf Coast. After service with the United States Army Air Corps (1942–1946), he remained in Europe to earn his first university degree, a licence in political science from the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva in 1948. He then accepted a position as a junior research anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley, where he did fieldwork in 1951 on the Luiseño language, collaborating with Alfred L. Kroeber on The Sparkman Grammar of Luiseño (University of California Press, 1960). In 1953–1955 he was a research associate for the Tri-Institutional Pacific Program (a consortium of Yale University, the University of Hawaii, and the Bernice P. Bishop Museum in Honolulu) and then for Yale University conducting research in Austronesian linguistics. In 1955–1956 he conducted a survey in the field of many languages in the Solomon Islands, New Caledonia, Papua New Guinea, and the former Netherlands New Guinea. In 1956–1957 he was an associate in Malayo-Polynesian linguistics at the Bishop Museum.