Lily Wong Fillmore death at age 92,American linguist

Lily Wong Fillmore, an American linguist and professor emerita in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley, died October 26, 2026, aged 92.

Her research focused on second language learning and teaching, and on education in language-minority communities. Born in Northern California to immigrant Chinese parents, she grew up in Watsonville.

Fillmore traced her interest in second language education to her own experience of starting school without knowing English, in a community with many immigrants. She earned a Ph.D. in linguistics from Stanford University in 1976, with a dissertation titled “The Second Time Around: Cognitive and social strategies in second language acquisition.” Her Berkeley career began in 1974, when she became assistant dean for student affairs at the Graduate School of Education. Two years later, she began teaching there as an assistant professor. She spent her career at the university and later held the title of Professor Emerita in its Graduate School of Education. Her work brought together the study of how people learn and teach a second language with questions of education in communities where minority languages are spoken. Her own early experience of entering school without English was a stated source of her interest in that field.