David I. Salo (born 1969) is a linguist who worked on the languages of J. R. R. Tolkien for the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy, expanding the Elvish languages (particularly Sindarin) by building on vocabulary already known from published works, and defining some languages that previously had a very small published vocabulary. He is a graduate student in linguistics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.His primary professional interest is Tocharian, an extinct Indo-European language spoken in the Tarim Basin and Turfan Depression during the Middle Ages.