page_title: List of Russian people
section_title: Linguists and ethnographers
hierarchical_section_title: List of Russian people / Scientists and scholars / Linguists and ethnographers
caption_attribution_description: English: Photo of Nicholas Miklouho-Maclay
context_page_description: This is a list of people associated with the modern Russian Federation, the Soviet Union, Imperial Russia, Russian Tsardom, the Grand Duchy of Moscow, Kievan Rus', and other predecessor states of Russia.
  Regardless of ethnicity or emigration, the list includes famous natives of Russia and its predecessor states, as well as people who were born elsewhere but spent most of their active life in Russia.
context_section_description: Vasily Abaev, major researcher of Iranian languages
  Alexander Afanasyev, leading Russian folklorist, recorded and published over 600 Russian fairy tales, by far the largest folktale collection by any one man in the world
  Ivan Baudouin de Courtenay, co-invented the concept of phoneme and the systematic treatment of linguistical alternations, pioneered synchronic analysis and mathematical linguistics
  Vladimir Bogoraz, researcher of Chukchi people, founder of the Institute of the Peoples of the North
  Otto von Böhtlingk, prominent Indologist and Sanskrit grammarian
  Fyodor Buslaev, philologist and folklorist, representative of the Mythological school of comparative literature
  Vladimir Dahl, Russian language lexicographer of the 19th century, folklorist and turkologist, author of the Explanatory Dictionary of the Live Great Russian language
  Johann Gottlieb Georgi, explorer, published the first full-scale work on ethnography of indigenous peoples of Russia
  Dmitry Gerasimov, medieval translator, diplomat and philologist, correspondent of European Renaissance scholars
  Vladislav Illich-Svitych, founder of Nostratic linguistics
  Vyacheslav Ivanov, founder of glottalic theory of Indo-European consonantism
  Roman Jakobson, preeminent 20th century linguist and literary theorist, a founder of phonology, major Slavist, author of Jackobson's Communication Model
  Pyotr Kafarov, prominent sinologist, developed the cyrillization of Chinese, discovered The Secret History of the Mongols
  Yuri Knorozov, linguist, epigrapher and ethnographer, deciphered the Maya script, proposed a decipherment for the Indus script
  Nikolay Krushevsky, co-inventor of the concept of phoneme and the systematic treatment of linguistical alternations
  Gerasim Lebedev, pioneer of Indology, introduced Bengali script typing to Europe, founded the first European-style theater in India
  Dmitry Likhachov, major 20th century expert on Old East Slavic and literature
  Mikhail Lomonosov, polymath scientist and artist, wrote a grammar that reformed Russian literary language by combining Old Church Slavonic with vernacular tongue
  Nikolay Lvov, polymath artist and scientist, compiled the first significant collection of Russian folk songs, published epic bylinas
  Richard Maack, naturalist and ethographer of Siberia
  Sergey Malov, turkologist, classified the Turkic alphabets, deciphered the ancient Orkhon script
  Nicholas Marr, put forth a pseudo-linguistic Japhetic theory on the origin of language
  Igor Melchuk, structural linguist, author of Meaning-Text Theory
  Nicholai Miklukho-Maklai, anthropologist who lived and traveled among the natives of Papua New Guinea and Pacific islands, prominent anti-racist
  Semyon Novgorodov, Yakut politician and linguist, creator of written Yakut language (Sakha scripts)
  Stephan of Perm, 14th century missionary, converted Komi Permyaks to Christianity and invented the Old Permic script
  Yevgeny Polivanov, linguist, orientalist and polyglot, developed the cyrillization of Japanese
  Nicholas Poppe, prominent Altaic-language researcher
  Vladimir Propp, formalist scholar, major researcher of folk tales and mythology
  Isaac Jacob Schmidt, first researcher of Mongolian language
  Leopold von Schrenck, naturalist and ethnographer, coined the term Paleo-Asiatic peoples, the first director of the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography
  Aleksey Shakhmatov, founder of textology, prepared major 20th century reforms of Russian orthography, pioneered the systematic research of Old Russian and medieval Russian literature
  Lev Shcherba, phonetician and phonologist, author of the glokaya kuzdra phrase
  Fyodor Shcherbatskoy, Indologist, initiated the scholarly study of Buddhist philosophy in the West
  Izmail Sreznevsky, leading 19th century Slavist, published Codex Zographensis, Codex Marianus and Kiev Fragments
  Sergei Starostin, prominent supporter of Altaic theory, proposed the Dené–Caucasian languages macrofamily, reconstructed several Eurasian proto-languages
  Vasily Tatischev, geographer, ethnographer and historian, compiled the first encyclopedic dictionary of Russia
caption: Nicholai Miklukho-Maklai
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