Check out Daniel Everett.

I went with Quine, but I'm wondering if I shouldn't have chosen Davidson instead. Overall, I'd be comfortable renaming this list, "People who have said some pretty ridiculous shit about language."

Johann Georg Hamann or Ludwig Wittgenstein

Unless it is myself, I am not qualified to judge.
It is not myself.

I feel there is a difference between philosophy and Top of the Pops or the Olympic games such that picking winners is both futile and demeaning.

Chomsky is not a philosopher.

You know it's Wittgenstein, right?

"Chomsky's intellectual life had been divided between his work in linguistics and his political activism, philosophy coming as a distant third. Nonetheless, his influence among analytic philosophers has been enormous ... he has persistently defended his views against all takers, engaging in important debates with many of the major figures in analytic philosophy throughout his career."

Courtesy of Wikipedia, that's Zoltán Gendler Szabó writing as part of his entry for Chomsky in the Dictionary of Modern American Philosophers, 1860-1960

Re Szabó he's a philosophy professor at Yale. His Yale page says, "My main interests lie in philosophy of language and metaphysics. Among my current areas of research are the semantics of modality, tense and aspect, the relationship between lexical and ontological categories, and the nature of context."

Phil. language doesn't really have 'great' figures so much as incremental technical advances. If I had to pick, probably Frege, for the principle of compositionality and the notion of function application as the model of compositionality. He also seems to be the first person to have clearly distinguished intension versus extension as compositional levels rather than as mere conceptual differences, and the first to coherently articulate the distinction between entailment and conversational implicature, and between entailment and presupposition. All analytic phil. language is in a way footnotes to Frege in broad strokes - the notion of the semantics of a natural language being mathematically describable is paramount.

Wittgenstein is okay, but overrated in the sense that much of what he concretely proposed for specific linguistic structures is not widely taken seriously. The Tractatus does lay a sort of blueprint for a lot of model-theoretic semantics, though. I think much of what Quine did was extremely damaging, like the notion that intensions are 'spooky' or that you can't quantify into modal contexts, and we are still undoing a lot of that damage, although I like some of his non-technical ideas. Kripke is the reverse - his development of model-theoretic semantics for modal logic is extremely important, but his 'higher level' philosophizing was broadly naive and damaging.

Chomsky has a coherent philosophy of language as outlined in Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, and sees himself as directly descended from the continental rationalist tradition.

I don't think he has a lot of philosophical sophistication, and is not a major phil. language figure, but I think including him is fair (I just wouldn't vote for him).

Denise Riley, but she isn't here :(