Dr Irina Nikolaeva awarded

Dr Irina Nikolaeva wins WINGS WorldQuest 2008 Women of Discovery Award

Dr Irina Nikolaeva of the Endangered Languages Academic Programme in the Department of Linguistics at SOAS has been awarded the 2008 Humanity Award by the Wings WorldQuest (WWQ) organization. The award is in recognition for the many years she has spent documenting endangered languages including syntax, morphology, typology, and information structure, and the traditional knowledge the languages embody. She has focused most notably on the Kolyma Yukaghir dialect, spoken by about forty people in North-East Siberia as well as Uralic, Altaic, and Paleosiberian languages.

Dr Nikolaeva’s award includes a trip to New York City for the award ceremony and an honorarium to support further fieldwork in Siberia.

For the last five years, WWQ has honored extraordinary explorers through the annual Women of Discovery Awards furthering their mission to advance the work of the explorers through research grants and creating related educational programs.

• For further information, see Dr Nikolaeva's page, and see some of Dr Nikolaeva's work on Kolyma Yukaghir at http://www.sgr.fi/yukaghir/index.html.