Team

Helsinki-based Olesya Khanina, PI of the project, and Hamburg & Moscow-based Valentin Gusev are the core members of this project. We are experts in Northern Samoyedic languages, with a typological background. We also have added expertise in sociolinguistics of small-scale communities (Olesya) and historical linguistics (Valentin). We have been documenting Nganasan since 1992 (Valentin) and Forest Enets and Tundra Enets since 2005 (Olesya). We have also first-hand experience with Tundra Nenets, Southern Samoyedic, and neighboring Tungusic and Turkic languages, as well as a record of dealing with archival Northern Samoyedic materials (e.g. Gusev 2018, Khanina, forthcoming).

Three other researchers join this project at various times for specific tasks.

Yuri Koryakov, a Moscow-based expert in linguistic geography and linguistic maps, with specialization in languages of Russia, is responsible for compilation of comparative wordlists and for the geographic part of the study, as well as for production of all illustrative maps. Koryakov has been studying geographic aspects of language contact in the North for more than a decade and has compiled Swadesh 100-wordlists for five Northern Samoyedic languages (Koryakov 2018) (to join the project in summer of 2023).

Kaj Syrjänen, a member of the BEDLAN project with experience in computational approaches to Uralic lexicon, will realize computational analysis of the comparative Northern Samoyedic wordlists and thus contribute to pulling apart vertical evolution and horizontal admixture for Northern Samoyedic (to join the project in 2024).

Postdoc, a professional in computational science, geospatial modelling, or equivalent, will participate in the interdisciplinary reconstruction of the Proto-NS area and the subsequent migrations (to join the project in 2024).