John U Wolff

John U. Wolff was born in Berlin, Germany on November 1, 1932 and escaped the Nazis, coming to the US with his parents. He received his elementary education in Miami, Florida's Public Schools. He earned his BA and MA i at Cornell University and after serving in the US Army, went on for his Ph.D. in Linguistics at Yale University, with a dissertation on Cebuano Syntax.

He was a Visiting Instructor for Indonesian at Cornell University in the summer of 1960, a Research Aide and Instructor at Yale University from 1961 to 1963, and Professor of Linguistics and Asian Studies in Cornell University from 1963 until his retirement in 2002, after which he was granted the status of Professor Emeritus. Dr. Wolff was the Director of the SE Asia Program at Cornell University from 1993 to 1998.

He has written books and scholarly papers on sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, and lexicography of the Austronesian languages and compiled dictionaries of Cebuano and Indonesian. He has also published pedagogical materials at all levels for Cebuano, Tagalog (Filipino), and Indonesian, languages which he taught at Cornell University in addition to Javanese.