Axel Palmér

Human Past Junior Fellow, SCAS.
Guest Researcher, Leiden University

Axel Palmér is a historical linguist specializing in Indo-European languages. After undergraduate studies
in Indology and Linguistics at Uppsala University he continued his studies at Leiden University, where he
received his PhD in 2024 with a dissertation titled Indo-Slavic Lexical Isoglosses and the Prehistoric
Dispersal of Indo-Iranian.

Palmér’s research seeks to understand the diachronic development of the Indo-European languages, parti-
cularly the Indo-Iranian branch and its relationship to its European relatives. Beyond the development of
the languages themselves, however, he focuses on reconstructing the prehistoric movements and inter-
actions of the speakers of Indo-European languages by connecting linguistic evidence to real-world contexts
with the help of archaeology and population genomics. His PhD dissertation traces the dispersal of the Indo-
Iranian branch from Eastern Europe to Asia, starting from the disintegration of the Indo-European proto-
language around 3000 BCE. His papers have appeared in international journals such as Indogermanische
Forschungen, Indo-European Linguistics, and PLoS ONE. His co-authored paper “Indo-European cereal
terminology suggests a Northwest Pontic homeland for the core Indo-European languages” (Kroonen et al.,
2022) presents a new scenario of the early Indo-European dispersal, which has since received support from
genetic studies.

As a Fellow of the Human Past Fellowship Programme at SCAS, Palmér will investigate the relationship
between pastoralist and agriculturalist subsistence strategies in early Indo-Iranian societies.

This information is accurate as of the academic year 2024-25.