Almost everyone in my family is a musician. I am a linguist first and foremost, but I also take after my family as I love playing the guitar and singing. This is very useful on fieldtrips as we typically sing during dinner. We especially like to sing in the languages that we study. For example, I sang a couple of songs for a short episode about our fieldwork project on a Hill Mari You Tube channel.

I also gave a talk (together with my colleagues) about the singing culture in the Finno-Ugric languages that we studied. During the talk, we performed several of these songs.

I love visual art, particularly drawing. I've had the opportunity to draw pictures for the music collections of my father and grandfather, who are composers. I also draw birthday cards for all my friends. However, my penchant for art is not unrelated to my linguistic studies: I draw stimuli for my experiments; I use these stimuli to collect spontaneous dialogues from consultants.