are the national 'affiliations' relevant enough for links here? Few of these people seem to study a language related to their nationality. Is that the point?
Sid Lamb has done innovative work on California Indian Languages. If that isn't as close to American as you can get, I'm not sure what you think.
Related to your question, though, a linguist is rarely going to study just the language that is native to him/her.
Linguists study language itself, and use knowledge from studying particular languages as a way to understand the underlying principles in all languages.
- your second paragraph tends to agree with me. In answer to your first paragraph, I would say, "specialist in [Native American Lanugages]?" and "specialist in [African languages]? or some such, and original nationality is irrelevant.
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