Victor A. Friedman (born October 18, 1949) is an American linguist, Slavist. He is the Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Service Professor in Humanities at the University of Chicago. He holds an appointment in the Department of Linguistics and an associate appointment in the Department of Anthropology. He has published numerous articles in English, Macedonian, and Albanian.
Friedman was born in Chicago into a family of descendants of Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire and Romania. He received his B.A. in Russian language and literatureatReed College in 1970. Friedman's PhD was in Slavic languages and literatures and in general linguistics at the University of Chicago in 1975. His dissertation, The Grammatical Categories of the Macedonian Indicative, was the first publication about modern Macedonian in the U.S. and won the Mark Perry Galler prize for best dissertation in the Humanities Division at Chicago.
In 1994 he served as a senior policy and political analyst to the United Nations regarding policy in the former Yugoslavia, and since then he has been involved in other consultative roles in the region.
Member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences of Kosovo (2004)
Member of the Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Albania (2006)
Doctor Honoris Causa, University of Skopje (2007)
John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (2008–09)
Annual Award for Outstanding Contributions to Scholarship, American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (2009)
Annual Award for Distinguished Contributions to Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies Award, Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (2014)