Colin Paul Masica was an American linguist who was professor emeritus in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations and the Department of Linguistics at the University of Chicago. Besides being a specialist in Indo-Aryan languages, much of his work was on the typological convergence of languages belonging to different linguistic families in South Asia and beyond, more broadly on this phenomenon in general, and on possible explanations for and implications of it in connection with both linguistic and cultural history.