Larry Selinker

Larry Selinker died of cardiac arrest on May 10, 2026, in New York City. He was a foundational scholar in the field of second language acquisition, creating the concepts of interlanguage, fossilization, and language transfer in the early 1970s.
 
Selinker was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1937. He was the son of print shop owner Solomon Selinker and his wife Miriam Fabricant Selinker.  Larry Selinker earned degrees from Brandeis University, American University, and Georgetown University, and served in the Rhode Island Air National Guard. He received three Fulbright scholarships, at the University of Edinburgh, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and University of Kassel. He went on to assistant professorships at the University of Washington and San Jose State University, and then in 1977 a tenured professorship at the University of Michigan, becoming the Director of the school’s English Language Institute. After leaving Michigan in 1993, he became the Professor of Applied Linguistics at University of London Birkbeck. After joining New York University in 2002, he retired in 2005.
 
His seminal 1972 paper “Interlanguage” [International Review of Applied Linguistics] changed the field of second language acquisition. Interlanguage theory suggests that language of second-language learners adheres to specific rules that are different from those of the native language and the target language. This creates a unique language system called an interlanguage. In the same paper, Selinker introduced the concept of fossilization, the occurrence of adult language learners ceasing progress toward native-like fluency, regardless of continued exposure to the target language. The paper has been reprinted ten times in several languages.
 

In 1983 with Susan Gass, he co-edited the book Language Transfer in Language Learning. In 1992, he presented an historically-driven detailed update of the interlanguage hypothesis in the book Rediscovering Interlanguage. In 2008, Selinker and Gass published the popular introductory textbook Second Language Acquisition: An Introductory Course, which is still in use today. In addition to Gass, Selinker co-wrote with esteemed linguists Louis Trimble, Robert Bley-Vroman, Elaine Tarone, Dan Douglas, Usha Lakshmanan, Zhao Hong Han, and many others. 

Selinker is survived by his wife, language educator Sonia Rocca; his son, game designer Mike Selinker; and his sister, Lea Schneider.