Alexandra Aikhenvald

Aikhenvald has conducted extensive fieldwork on the Tariana language, an Arawak language spoken in the Vaupés region of northwest Amazonia in Brazil, producing the first comprehensive grammar of the language. She has also worked on other Arawak languages and has published broadly on linguistic typology, language contact in the Amazonian linguistic area, and evidentiality systems — grammatical markers that indicate the source of information.

Aikhenvald is a professor and the founding director of the Language and Culture Research Centre at Charles Darwin University in Darwin, Australia. She established the centre to support the documentation and description of endangered languages, particularly those of the Amazon basin and Papua New Guinea, and has held this position since moving to Australia from Brazil.

Aikhenvald is widely recognized for her work on evidentiality — the grammatical marking of information source — which she explored in her 2004 book 'Evidentiality,' published by Oxford University Press. She has also made major contributions to the study of language contact in the Vaupés region, where multiple languages coexist in a system of linguistic exogamy, and to typological classification of classifiers and serial verb constructions.

Born in Moscow, Aikhenvald was trained at Moscow State University but faced restrictions on conducting fieldwork within the Soviet system, which contributed to her eventual emigration. She left the Soviet Union and worked in Israel and Brazil before settling in Australia, and her multinational career has given her an unusually broad perspective on language contact and typology across multiple linguistic regions, from Amazonia to the Sepik region of Papua New Guinea.