Anthony Jakob is a historical linguist specializing in the Indo-European and Uralic languages. He completed a Bachelor’s degree in Russian and Music at the University of Sheffield before pursuing a Master’s and subsequently a PhD in Comparative Indo-European Linguistics at Leiden University. His PhD dissertation investigated language contact in the prehistory of the Baltic languages and formed the basis for his monograph A History of East Baltic through Language Contact (Leiden–Boston: Brill, 2024). He has authored and co-authored articles in the journals Indo-European Linguistics, PLOS ONE and Baltistica.

With his research, Jakob aims to shed light on the prehistoric interactions between the language communities that once inhabited the Baltic region, including those whose languages died out before they could be documented. He achieves this by studying the lexicon of the region’s languages and identifying words shared between them that appear to be borrowed but whose source cannot be identified. Through the use of linguistic archaeology, this evidence can be calibrated with real-world data in order to establish plausible archaeogenetic scenarios for the arrival of new linguistic groups in the region.

As a Human Past Fellow at SCAS, Jakob will apply his methodology to the westernmost Uralic languages (including Finnish, Estonian, Saami), and attempt to uncover evidence for prehistoric contact with undocumented languages during the westward migration of Uralic speakers.

This information is accurate as of the academic year 2025-26.