Yoko Yamazaki

Human Past Senior Fellow, SCAS.
Researcher, Department of Slavic and Baltic Studies, Finnish, Dutch and German, Stockholm University

Yoko Yamazaki is a researcher at the Baltic section, Stockholm University (SU), and is currently leading a
project funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, Traveling Voices — The diachronic development of the
voice system in Baltic, Slavic, and Germanic branches from a migrational perspective.

She is a historical linguist with special interests in the Baltic languages and Indo-European comparative
linguistics. After completing her PhD at SU, she was awarded an International Postdoc grant from Veten-
skapsrådet. With this grant, she stayed at the Department of Comparative Language Science, University
of Zurich.

In recent years, her interests have tended towards multidisciplinary approaches, combining historical
linguistics, archaeology and genetic analysis of ancient DNA. She is particularly fascinated by Early
Bronze Age linguistic and cultural contacts between Indo-European and West Uralic speakers in Northern
Europe and Fennoscandia. At SCAS, she will investigate some aspects of the life of these peoples in contact,
their working and eating habits, on the basis of Baltic loanwords in West Uralic and archaeological/archaeo-
genetic insights gained from the Seima-Turbino trans-cultural complex.

Her major publications include “Diathetic problem of the Baltic ā-preterits to the simple thematic presents”
in Historische Sprachforschung 134 (1), 2021, 290-311; and “Balto-Slavic accentology, schools of” in René
Genis and Marc L. Greenberg (eds.) Encyclopedia of Slavic Languages and Linguistics Online, Leiden: Brill,
First published online in 2017. She has co-edited (with Florian Sommer, Karin Stüber, and Paul Widmer)
Indogermanische Morphologie in erweiterter Sicht, Innsbruck: Institut für Sprachwissenschaft der Universität
2022.

Yoko Yamazaki is in residence in the autumn of 2024.
This information is accurate as of the academic year 2024-25.