Keren D. Rice OC (born 1949) is a Canadian linguist. She is a professor of linguistics and serves as the Director of the Centre for Aboriginal Initiatives at the University of Toronto.^[1][2]

Rice earned her PhD in 1976 from the University of Toronto, with a dissertation entitled, "Hare phonology."^[3]

She has published numerous works in both theoretical and Native American linguistics, in particular on Athapaskan languages.^[4] She specializes in research on Slavey, an indigenous language spoken in Canada's Northwest Territories, and has long been involved in maintaining and revitalizing the language.^[5] She has made contributions to the study of phonological markedness (Rice 2007) and to the interaction of phonology, morphology and semantics (Rice 2000).

• Rice was elected as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2005.^[6] She was elected as a fellow of the Linguistic Society of America in 2009.^[7]
• Rice was elected as a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2014.^[8]
• From 2002 to 2008 she served on the board of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), a granting agency of the federal government of Canada.^[9]
• In 2011 she received the Killam Prize, given annually to five of Canada's finest academics for their career achievements in fields of scientific and scholastic research.^[10]
• In 2013 she won the National Achievement Award from the Canadian Linguistic Association for outstanding contributions to the field of linguistics.^[11]
• In 2013 she was appointed by the Governor General of Canada as an Officer in the Order of Canada,^[12] which is one of Canada's highest civilian honors.^[13]
• In 2015 she was elected as a Fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.^[2]
• In 2015 Rice received the Pierre Chauveau medal of the Royal Society of Canada, awarded for her continued contributions as a scholar, including her extensive work in language documentation, activism, and theoretical linguistics.^[14][15]
• Rice served as president of the Canadian Linguistic Association from 1998 to 2002^[16]
• Rice served as the president of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) in 2012.^[17]
• Rice served as the president of the Association for Linguistic Typology (ALT) from 2020 until 2022.^[18]

Rice, K. 1977. Hare Noun Dictionary. Ottawa: Northern Social Research Division, Department of Indian and Northern Affairs.

E. Cook and K. Rice (eds.) 1989. Athapaskan Linguistics: Current Perspectives on a Language Family. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. ISBN 978-3-11-011166-8

Rice, K. 1989. A Grammar of Slave. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. ISBN 978-3-11-010779-1

Rice, K. 1992. "On deriving sonority: a structural account of sonority relationships." Phonology 9: 61—99.

Rice, K. 1993. "A reexamination of the feature [sonorant]: the status of 'sonorant obstruents'." Language 69: 308–344.

Rice, K. 1996. Default variability: The coronal-velar relationship. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 14, 493–543. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00133597

Rice, K. 2000. Morpheme Order and Semantic Scope: Word Formation in the Athapaskan Verb. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rice, K. 2006. Ethical Issues In Linguistic Fieldwork: An Overview. Journal of Academic Ethics 4, 123–155. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10805-006-9016-2

Rice, K. 2007. Markedness in phonology. In P. Lacy (Ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Phonology (Cambridge Handbooks in Language and Linguistics, pp. 79–98). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511486371.005

Rice, K. & L. Saxon. 2008. Comparative Athapaskan Syntax: Arguments and Projections. In: The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Syntax, Edited by Guglielmo Cinque and Richard S. Kayne. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195136517.013.0016