Margaret Langdon

Academic career

Langdon (née Storms) was born in Belgium and immigrated to the United States following World War II. She grew up speaking French and Flemish. She earned her PhD in 1966 at the University of California-Berkeley under Mary Haas. Her doctoral thesis was a dictionary of the Mesa Grande dialect of Diegueño.

She taught at the Linguistics Department of the University of California, San Diego from 1965 to 1991, where she served as chair of the department from 1985 to 1988.

Langdon worked with various tribal elders throughout her career on southwestern languages. She compiled the first dictionary of the Mesa Grande language. She was a leading figure in the field of Yuman language studies.