STORY UPDATED: check for updates below.

He's Alive

Is famed linguist Noam Chomsky dead as of June 18, 2024? No, that's not true: The claim that Chomsky had died was posted without sources, corroborating information or witness statements. The account that posted it subsequently published a correction saying Chomsky had not died. Journalists who contacted Chomsky's wife, Valeria Wasserman Chomsky, were told that the linguist was not dead.

The claim appeared in a post (archived here) published on X on June 18, 2024. The post included a picture of Chomsky and read:

RIP Noam Chomsky.
Modern linguistics moved beyond his ideas, but there is no question that modern linguistics would barely exist if it wasn't for his work in the mid-20th century

This is what the post looked like on X at the time of writing:

(Source: X screenshot taken on Tue Jun 18 21:37:23 2024 UTC)

An article (archived here) published on June 18, 2024, reports that Chomsky was hospitalized as he recovered from a stroke he suffered in June 2023 (archived here). However, the article states that he was released from the hospital on June 18, 2024, to continue his treatment at home.

Lead Stories reached out to the Beneficencia Portuguesa hospital in São Paulo, Brazil, where Chomsky was, according to the AP News article, receiving treatment. On June 19, 2024, we received an emailed statement from the hospital in Portuguese. We translated the statement to English using Google Translate, with Lead Stories contributor Helena Cavendish validating the translation:

The Portuguese Beneficência de São Paulo informs that patient Avram Noam Chomsky was discharged from hospital this Tuesday to continue treatment at home

In posts made on their respective X accounts on June 18, 2024, both Chris Looft (archived here), a visual verification producer for ABC News, and Jose Santana (archived here), a former research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where Chomsky taught, stated that Wasserman told them personally that the rumor of Chomsky's death was false.

The user who made the claim corrected the misinformation in a later post made on June 18, 2024, (archived here), although they stated that they left their initial post up "because it remains appreciative."