Anna Wierzbicka

Anna Wierzbicka (born in 1938 in Poland) is a linguist at the Australian National University. She also lectures at Warsaw University and Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin, Poland. She studied at Warsaw University. In 1972 she moved from Poland to Australia.

Wierzbicka is famous for her work in semantics, pragmatics, and cross-cultural linguistics. She is especially known for Natural Semantic Metalanguage, particularly the concept of semantic primes. This is a research agenda resembling Leibniz's original "alphabet of human thought", which Wierzbicka credits her colleague, linguist Andrzej Bogusławski, with reviving in the late 1960s.