Michael Halliday
British linguist · United Kingdom · On the map · Academics · Lived 1925 to 2018 · aged 93
Michael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday, often credited as M. A. K. Halliday, was a British linguist who developed the internationally influential systemic functional linguistics (SFL) model of language. His grammatical descriptions go by the name of systemic functional grammar.
Michael Halliday is read about 80 times a day, in 29 languages.
A typical day, 30 days to 6 November 2026
The middle day of the days counted, so one week of news cannot move it. The line under it is the last 104 days, one point a day.
Something wrong?A life in dates
People around Michael
Michael HallidayPartners
Is this everyone?
Only relatives with a profile here are drawn, so a family can be larger than this. A line here can also be wrong. A marriage is drawn as ended only where its end is recorded, so a spouse drawn here may be a former one.
Correct this familyMedia & music
Photos 1
Awards
About this person
Halliday described language as a semiotic system, "not in the sense of a system of signs, but a systemic resource for meaning". For Halliday, language was a "meaning potential"; by extension, he defined linguistics as the study of "how people exchange meanings by 'languaging'". Halliday described himself as a generalist, meaning that he tried "to look at language from every possible vantage point", and has described his work as "wander[ing] the highways and byways of language". But he said that "to the extent that I favoured any one angle, it was the social: language as the creature and creator of human society".
