Martha Ratliff


Martha Ratliff is an American linguist and Professor Emerita at Wayne State University. She is a leading specialist in Hmong–Mien languages and also notable for her recent reconstruction of Proto-Hmong–Mien.
Ratliff earned a B.A. in English from Carleton College in 1968, an M.A.T. in English Education from University of Chicago in 1970, and a Ph.D. in Linguistics from University of Chicago in 1986, with a dissertation entitled The Morphological Functions of Tone in White Hmong.
She currently serves as an associate editor for the historical linguistics journal Diachronica. She is co-founder of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society along with Eric Schiller.

Publications