Быльда дуг,инсян, к,ан оон,ан, / Bɨlʲda duɣinsʲan qān óòŋaŋ! ('may all those who live be healthy and well!' in Ket, see below)

I'm a PhD candidate in Field Linguistics Research Lab, in the Department of Linguistics, at the University of California - San Diego, in my 5th year currently. My background is in both linguistics and Russian/post-Soviet area studies, focusing on Russia's minority ethnic republics (in practice, colonies). 

My work now focuses primarily on the Ket language, an Indigenous, unique, highly endangered language of central Siberia, for which see my The Ket people and their words page. I'm also very interested in the other Indigenous languages of Siberia and the Russian Far East (about 40 languages, belonging to seven different language families, groups of languages descended from a common ancestor language), especially Samoyedic, and, more recently, also of North America, especially the Indigenous peoples and languages of Alaska (about 23 languages, across four families: Na-Dene, Yupik-Inuit-Unangan, Haida, and Tsimshian).

From a theoretical standpoint, my research focuses on morphological typology - on how morphology (roughly, the structure of words, and more abstractly, the way in which languages encode information) varies across the world's roughly 6,000 languages (the vast majority small, Indigenous, endangered, and radically different from the languages most of us speak, have studied, or grew up with).  As a part of this, I study morphological complexity, roughly, the amount and kinds of information that can be packed into single words, and how opaque the relationship can be between units of that information (for example, for a verb, things like past tense or 1st-person subject, and meanings like 'go' or 'take'), and the formal units that different languages use to express them  (things like roots, prefixes, suffixes, changes to the stem, tone, and so on, see this page for a specific example from Ket). 

I'm especially interested in these questions in polysynthetic languages, very roughly, those languages which tend to pack most of the information in the sentence into single words, usually the verb, of which Ket is an example, e.g. dattuɣolʲbət is a single word, a verb, and a grammatically correct sentence on its own, which means 'I brought it (e.g. ūlʲ 'water') uphill from the river to here, and it took me multiple trips back and forth to do it'.

Theoretically, I take an abstractive (also, Word-and-Paradigm, WP, see Blevins 2006, 2016) and usage-based (e.g. Bybee et al. 1994, Bybee 2006) approach to morphology, and languages in general. Linguists working in these and related theories reject the Chomskyan idea that all languages share some innate, abstract underlying structure (known by Chomskyans as Universal Grammar, UG), which is often assumed to be in some sense optimal. Instead, we understand languages as complex adaptive systems, essentially cultural tools, adaptations by humans to the human mind, which evolve over time, through the dynamics of human communication, based on and constrained by domain-general (not specific to language) cognitive processes like memory and learning (for more, see this article). In their structures, languages are not optimal, have no obvious a priori limit on how different or complex they can be, beyond being learnable by a human, and each family of languages is its own world, potentially with structures and ways of talking about the world that are entirely its own. 

I see the main lesson of linguistic science as this: every language is a record of a whole way of being human, a precious treasure, created by and from the thoughts and interactions of its speakers, and their linguistic ancestors, over the  millennia. Languages exist at the intersection of cognition, culture, and human history, and are indispensable in understanding all three. 

In his masterpiece book Dying Words: Endangered Languages and What They Have to Tell Us, Nicholas Evans speaks of "travelling the thought-paths that [a language's] ancestral speakers once blazed" (pg. xviii), having a chance to hear, literally in their own words, others, often those who have long since left us, and often those whose world was most different from ours, whose lives still echo through the words of their linguistic decedents. For some humble things I have learned, see again my page on the Kets and their words, and for more on Indigenous languages and examples of the stories they have to tell us, see Dying Words (Ket is one language discussed), as well as K. David Harrison's amazing work When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World’s Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge (here also, Native Siberian languages, among many others, have a beautiful story to tell). 

Research interests: language documentation, language revitalization and reclamation, morphological (morphosyntactic) typology, morphological (morphosyntactic) theory, morphological complexity, polysynthesis, language change, grammaticalization & lexicalization,  areal linguistics and language contact, languages of North Asia, especially Yeniseian, Samoyedic, and Turkic, languages of North America, especially Na-Dene, Yupik-Inuit-Unangan, and Salishan, languages of the Caucasus,  word class typology.

Outside of linguistics, I am also very interested in ancient history, alternative music (doom metal/sludge/black metal, electro-industrial/aggrotech/EBM, darkwave, goth rock, neofolk/folk metal/folk rock; anything dark, artful, and ethereal and/or heavy -hit me up on Instagram), and the academic study of "religion" (a culturally-specific concept that stops being useful quickly in comparative perspective; Native Siberians called a "Russian shaman" not a priest, but a doctor), particularly Indo-Tibetan-Mongolian-Siberian (Vajrayana) Buddhism,  Eastern Christianity and early Christianity,  Native Siberian Shamanism (the correct term for Siberia) and other Native Siberian traditions, and the Indigenous spiritual traditions of North America. I'm also very interested in anthropology, especially archeology and human prehistory, but I have a lot to learn still.