David Appleyard (born 1950 in Leeds, England) is a British academic and an specialist in Ethiopian languages and linguistics. He is Professor Emeritus of the Languages of the Horn of Africa at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in the University of London, where he specialized in Amharic and other Ethiopian Semitic languages, as well as various Cushitic languages of the region. He went first to SOAS as a student in 1968, studying Amharic and Linguistics, and completed his doctorate there on the Semitic basis of the Amharic lexicon in 1975, with Edward Ullendorff as supervisor. He then joined the staff at SOAS where he remained from 1975 until his retirement in September 2006. He taught Amharic language and literature, as well as courses on Ge’ez, Tigrinya, Somali, Oromo, Afr