John B. Haviland is a linguistic anthropologist, distinguished research professor of Anthropology at UCSD. His work concentrates on Tzotzil (Mayan) speakers from Zinacantán, Chiapas, Mexico , and on speakers of Guugu Yimithirr (Paman), especially at the Hopevale Aboriginal Community, near Cooktown, in northern Queensland, Australia. He helped document the Barrow Point (Paman) language of far north Queensland, collaborating with the late Roger Hart, by his own reckoning its last surviving speaker. Haviland has most recently engaged in an ongoing study of language origins based on extensive documentation of a first generation sign language (Zinacantec Family Homesign, or "Z") from Chiapas, Mexico. Haviland’s research interests include Mexican merolicos (street performers), gesture and multimodal interaction, ethnomusicology, and language and the law, especially as it involves speakers of indigenous languages of Mexico and Central America. Haviland has also done fieldwork with speakers of Amuzgo (Otomanguean), both in their home community in Oaxaca and in an immigrant community in Oceanside, California, part of a wider set of studies about Mexican indigenous people in diaspora. In 2005 he founded and until 2019 directed UCSD’s Linguistic Anthropology Laboratory. (The first fourteen years of the Lab's activity can be consulted at the pre-2018 Linguistic Anthropology Website.)

Those interested in the Tzotzil language may find useful Haviland's Tzotzil pedagogical grammar published in Spanish, as Sk'op Sotz'leb: El Tzotzil de San Lorenzo Zinacantán by the UNAM. A PDF version of the late Robert M. Laughlin's monumental 2007 Tzotzil-Spanish dictionary, Mol Cholobil K'op ta Sotz'leb (El Gran Dccionario Tzotzil de San Lorenzo Zinacantán), a Spanish version of his original Tzotzil dictionary (1975) and both now sadly out print, can be found here.

An article about some of Haviland's work appeared in Reed Magazine, published at Reed College, where Haviland was formerly professor of Linguistics and Anthropology.

Haviland is a qualified and experienced legal and health related interpreter for the Tzotzil language.