Luo Changpei (1899 - 1958) was a Chinese linguist. He made important contributions to the study of historical Chinese phonology

Historical Chinese phonology

Historical Chinese phonology deals with reconstructing the sounds of Chinese from the past. As Chinese is written with logographic characters, not alphabetic or syllabary, the methods employed in Historical Chinese phonology differ considerably from those employed in, for example, Indo-European...

. He was also a pioneer of the modern studies of Chinese dialects and of non-Chinese languages in China.

Born into a Manchu family, he graduated from the Peking University

Peking University

Peking University , colloquially known in Chinese as Beida , is a major research university located in Beijing, China, and a member of the C9 League. It is the first established modern national university of China. It was founded as Imperial University of Peking in 1898 as a replacement of the...

. Besides spending some years in the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 as a visiting scholar, he spent most of his academic life at Peking University. One of his students there was Michael Halliday

Michael Halliday

Michael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday is a British linguist who developed an internationally influential model of language, the systemic functional linguistic model. His grammatical descriptions go by the name of systemic functional grammar .-Biography:Halliday was born and raised in England...

. In 1929, along with Yuen Ren Chao

Yuen Ren Chao

Chao Yuen Ren was a Chinese American linguist and amateur composer. He made important contributions to the modern study of Chinese phonology and grammar....

 and Li Fanggui

Li Fanggui

Li Fang-Kuei was a Chinese linguist. He resided in the United States after 1938.-Biography:Li was one of the first Chinese to study linguistics outside China. Originally a student of medicine, he switched to linguistics when he went to the United States in 1924. He gained a BA in linguistics at...

, he became a researcher at the Institute of History and Philology (歷史語言研究所) of the Academia Sinica

Academia Sinica

The Academia Sinica , headquartered in the Nangang District of Taipei, is the national academy of Taiwan. It supports research activities in a wide variety of disciplines, ranging from mathematical and physical sciences, to life sciences, and to humanities and social sciences.Academia Sinica has...

 (then located at Beijing, i.e. the now Chinese Academy of Sciences

Chinese Academy of Sciences

The Chinese Academy of Sciences , formerly known as Academia Sinica, is the national academy for the natural sciences of the People's Republic of China. It is an institution of the State Council of China. It is headquartered in Beijing, with institutes all over the People's Republic of China...

). He also served as director of the Research Institute of Linguistics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences , established in 1977, is the premier and highest academic research organization in the fields of philosophy and social sciences as well as a national center for comprehensive studies in the People's Republic of China. It was described by Foreign Policy...

 until his death in 1958.

Luo also co-authored a book on the 'Phags-pa script with Cai Meibiao .