International Eurasian Academy of Sciences, IEAS

Academician

Juha A. Janhunen

Profile:

Elected Academician of the International Eurasian Academy of Sciences on 28 September 2017, Professor Juha A. Janhunen is one of Finland’s foremost linguists and an internationally recognised authority on the languages and ethnohistory of northern Eurasia. Born in Pori, Finland, on 12 February 1952, he earned his M.A. in 1976 and his Ph.D. in Finno-Ugrian Linguistics from the University of Helsinki in 1986, with a dissertation on Samoyedic languages that laid the foundation for his subsequent scholarly career. He served as Docent in North Asian Studies at Helsinki from 1986 to 1994 and as a Senior Research Fellow of the Academy of Finland before being appointed Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Helsinki in 1994, a position he has held for three decades. Alongside his Helsinki appointment, he has served as Honorary Professor at Inner Mongolia University since 1998 and as Docent in Ethnohistory at Åbo Akademi since 2011. A Member of Academia Europaea (elected 2008), the Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters (2003), and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (2013), he received the E. J. Nyström Prize from the Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters in 2014.

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His research encompasses comparative linguistics, ethnohistory, field linguistics, and language revitalisation, with particular emphasis on the Uralic, Mongolic, and Tungusic language families of northern Eurasia. He is internationally recognised for his reconstruction of Proto-Samoyedic and Proto-Uralic, his critical reassessment of the Altaic hypothesis, and his authoritative studies of the Mongolic languages. His extensive body of work includes such influential publications as Samojedischer Wortschatz (1977), Manchuria: An Ethnic History (1996), the landmark edited volume The Mongolic Languages (2003), New Materials on the Khitan Small Script (2010, with Wu Yingzhe), and the comprehensive grammar Mongolian (2012). Beyond historical and comparative linguistics, he has contributed substantially to international efforts to document and protect endangered languages, including the UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger and the Endangered Languages Catalogue (ElCat). The five selected works below—covering the revitalisation of Nivkh on Sakhalin (2018), the PEEX synthesis of land–atmosphere–ocean–society interactions (2016), shared drift in bound morphology across Eurasia (2012), his monographic grammar Mongolian (2012), and new materials on the Khitan small script (2010)—encapsulate a career dedicated to reconstructing the linguistic history of northern Eurasia while preserving the living cultural heritage of its diverse and endangered speech communities.