languagist

plural languagists

1. A linguist; one who is proficient in languages.

   "Now you just get ahold of yourself, lady, and tell me what's going on. In English. I ain't no languagist, you hear?”

   2012, Frank O'Neill, Georgia Bound, →ISBN

   2 more examples

   "Oh dear, dear!" said Miss Crocky, admiringly, " he is such a languagist ; isn't he, Miss Norah? I tell him he's thrown away here. His place is at courts, I'm sure."

   1871, Victoria Rybot, Half a dozen daughters, page 124

   'French ain't a hurtin' me,' says I, 'it's my English, I guess their French is mostly like that Pasadena woman's Herman's wife was a tellin' me about. Herself an' all her friends thought she was a fine French languagist, an' when she went into a restaurant in Paris the only way she could make the French waiter understand she wanted bread an' butter was a pintin' to it, an' then pintin' to her mouth.'

   1912, Sara White Isaman, Sophisticating Uncle Hiram, page 223

2. One who discriminates on the basis of language use.

   Identifying and curbing the activity of such ethnocentric languagist functionaries ought to rank high among Chicano political priorities .

   1982, Z. Anthony Kruszewski, Richard L. Hough, Jacob Ornstein-Galicia, Politics and Society in the Southwest: Ethnicity and Chicano Pluralism

   1 more example

   They can do with these all that the languagists claim to do, and more — save English for our children for, by the way they teach English the lifeblood has escaped, only the skeleton remains.

   1966, The Literary Criterion - Volume 7, Issue 3, page 76