INFORMATION
William Bright (August 13, 1928 in Oxnard, California – October 15, 2006 in Louisville, Colorado) was an American linguist and toponymist who specialized in Native American and South Asian languages and descriptive linguistics.
Bright earned a bachelor’s degree in linguistics in 1949 and a doctorate in the same field in 1955, both from the University of California, Berkeley. He was a professor of linguistics and anthropology at UCLA from 1959 to 1988. He then moved to the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he remained on the faculty until his death.