Royal Jon Skousen (born August 5, 1945) is an American linguist and retired professor of linguistics and English at Brigham Young University (BYU), where he is editor of the Book of Mormon Critical Text Project. He is "the leading expert on the textual history of the Book of Mormon" and the founder of the analogical modeling approach to language modeling.

Early life

Skousen was born in Cleveland, Ohio, to Leroy Bentley Skousen and Helen Louise Skousen, a Latter-day Saint family and was one of eleven children. He is a nephew to W. Cleon Skousen. He graduated from Sunset High School in Beaverton, Oregon. Skousen's father unexpectedly died from lung cancer in 1964 despite never having smoked. Skousen served as an LDS missionary in Finland from 1965 to 1967.

Studies

Skousen received his B.A. degree from BYU, with a major in English and a minor in mathematics. Skousen went on to study linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, earning his Ph.D. degree there in 1972.

Career

Skousen was an assistant professor of linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin from the earning of his PhD until 1979, when he joined the faculty of BYU. He was also a visiting professor at the University of California, San Diego in 1981, a Fulbright lecturer at the University of Tampere in Finland in 1982, and a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, Netherlands, in 2001. In 1999, BYU presented him the Karl G. Maeser Excellence in Research and Creative Arts Awards. Since 1999, Skousen has served as the president of the Utah Association of Scholars, an affiliate of the National Association of Scholars. He has also been associate editor of the Journal of Quantitative Linguistics since 2003.

Personal life

Having served his mission in Finland, Skousen is fluent in Finnish. Skousen married Sirkku Unelma Härkönen in 1968. They have seven children and live in Orem, Utah.

Works

Books

Articles and papers