John D. Bengtson (1948–2024) was an American historical and anthropological linguist. He had been president and vice-president of the Association for the Study of Language in Prehistory, and had served as editor (or co-editor) of the journal Mother Tongue (1996–2003, 2007–2024). Since 2001 he had been a member/researcher of Evolution of Human Languages, an international project on the linguistic prehistory of humanity coordinated by the Santa Fe Institute. His areas of work included Scandinavian languages and linguistics, Indo-European linguistics, the proposed Dené–Caucasian language family and paleolinguistics.