?
N’yng-dyuumgu, n’yng-ngafq: Festschrift for Ekaterina Gruzdeva
Ekaterina Gruzdeva celebrates her 60th birthday on July 29, 2025. As the editors of the present volume, we are delighted to congratulate Katia with this Festschrift. Ekaterina Gruzdeva was born on 29 July 1965 in Saint Petersburg, then known as Leningrad. She completed her entire schooling, pursued her university
studies, and subsequently worked as a researcher on Vasilievsky Island. At the Leningrad State University (now Saint Petersburg State University) located on her home island, Katia earned her master’s degree at the Faculty of Philology, in the Department of Structural, Applied, and Mathematical Linguistics. She then
began her doctoral studies at the Leningrad branch of the Institute of Linguistics of the Soviet Academy of Sciences (now Russian Academy of Sciences), where there was a need for a researcher on Paleo-Asiatic and Siberian languages to succeed Erukhim Kreinovich. Among the languages studied by Kreinovich, Katia
chose Nivkh, also known as Gilyak, as her main focus. Initially, her research was centred on the then less-known Nivkh speakers of Sakhalin, known as Nighvng, and she embarked on her first fieldwork to Sakhalin in 1989.
Katia’s doctoral research, completed in 1994 and accepted as a doctoral dissertation in 1995, was entitled “Taksisnye otnosheniya vo vremennyx polipredikativnyx konstrukciyax nivxskogo yazyka” and focused on temporal converbal constructions in Nivkh. She collected most of the research material on Eastern
Sakhalin dialects herself during field trips in 1989 and 1991. In her work, Katia used glossing as an aid in examining syntactic structures, which was not a given at the time her dissertation was accepted. Since then, her fieldwork with the Nivkh people has continued regularly, and Katia has researched all varieties of Nivkh languages, including also the Lower Amur, Amur estuary, and Northwestern and
Northern Sakhalin dialects. Katia’s life’s work contributing to the documentation, description, and revitalisation of Nivkh languages is impressive. Her work for the language community continues both as academic research and as revitalisation efforts in collaboration with the community.
As a researcher, Katia is remarkably versatile. In addition to her current strong descriptive and typological research approach, she has a command of the structuralist and generative research traditions thanks to her education in Saint Petersburg. With her extensive fieldwork experience, sociolinguistic approaches and anthropological linguistics are also part of Katia’s repertoire. In recent years,
Katia has expanded her focus from Nivkh to Russia’s minority languages more broadly, including methods for determining their vitality in a project aimed at documenting and preserving these languages. Another testimony of Katia’s nature as a constantly evolving researcher is her work on urban multilingualism,
which she has conducted in Helsinki in collaboration with her students. Katia’s list of publications can be viewed on the University of Helsinki’s research portal.
Katia arrived at the University of Helsinki in the early 2000s. In 2002, she began teaching field linguistics courses as a part-time teacher. Former students fondly remember these courses as highly rewarding, and now as experienced field linguists, they recount that the lessons learned continue to propel their own research work. Katia has served as a University Lecturer in General Linguistics
since 2008 and as a Senior University Lecturer since 2022. She was awarded the Title of Docent in General Linguistics in 2011. As a teacher, Katia has steered an astonishing array of courses ranging from phonology to syntax and sociolinguistics, demonstrating that her broad expertise in the subfields of linguistics is also a great strength in teaching. Over the years, Katia has developed both theoretical
and practical teaching of field linguistics and taught various specialised courses, such as those on the languages of Russia’s Far East and North America, endangered languages, and ecolinguistics, which contribute to making the profile of General Linguistics at the University of Helsinki internationally distinctive. A special highlight we want to mention was the Nivkh language club in the autumn
semester of 2014, where we studied the basics of the language using a skilfully illustrated Nivkh primer from the 1930s.
Katia is highly regarded as a teacher among both students and fellow educators. Her courses are among the most popular in our degree programmes and attract students widely from other language disciplines. As a teacher, Katia is both demanding and empathetic. She does not underestimate students and assigns them an active role on her courses, enabling a great deal of learning. At the same time, Katia is an understanding teacher and approaches students from diverse backgrounds with an open mind. She listens patiently to students’ needs and problems and, when needed, is adept at coming up with constructive suggestions that resolve students’ difficulties. Katia has supervised numerous bachelor’s and master’s theses as well as doctoral dissertations. Among the dissertations are several reference grammars, as well as studies in sociolinguistics and language contact, sound history and phonology, and research on evidentiality and writing systems. As a supervisor, Katia is always ready to engage in discussions, regularly checks in on her supervisees, and encourages them with gentle feedback, demonstrating her confidence in their abilities and respecting their research perspectives, whether the student is writing a bachelor’s thesis or a doctoral dissertation. Under Katia’s guidance, many of the editors and contributors in the Tabula
Gratulatoria have found their own voice as researchers.
Katia has played a central role as a member of the HALS network (Helsinki Diversity Linguistics Group, formerly Helsinki Area and Language Studies) that unites researchers interested in linguistic diversity at the University of Helsinki. She has made a particular contribution enabling the HALS field trips. Katia has been the main organiser for field trips to Sakhalin and Northern Hokkaido in 2014, Estonia in 2021, Romania in 2023, and Kyrgyzstan in 2024. During HALS field trips, students work in small groups with local speakers on a chosen research topic. These trips have had a lasting effect providing many future field linguists with invaluable opportunities to train practical research skills that cannot be
learned in a classroom. The trips have also resulted in several international seminars and academic publications.
We have many fond memories of moments with Katia over the years. Katia’s attentiveness as a colleague and trip leader was evident, for example, during the HALS field trip to Sakhalin and Hokkaido in 2014, when she surprised our group members, weary from overnight travel, giving out fresh apple and raspberry
doughnuts purchased from a local shop. We also warmly remember how Katia has shared her snacks with a teaching assistant while supervising exams, baked salmon pie for departmental gatherings, and hosted colleagues at her summer cottage in Kisko. Family and friends are important to Katia, and her childhood
and youth hobbies are still visible, for example, in her interest in culture: Katia is always a willing companion for dance performances, concerts, or art exhibitions. Occasionally, she is accompanied on her journeys by her cat Barsik, travelling on its own passport.
This Festschrift contains twenty-two scientific articles that, like Katia’s research, represent a broad range of fields in linguistics. The texts in the book are divided into three sections, named after the courses that Katia teaches. The first section, “Linguistic diversity and variation”, compiles articles that address linguistic diversity, variation, and language contact from both typological-regional and language-specific perspectives. The second section, “Language description and documentation”, consists of texts describing Nivkh as well as other languages of Russia, Eastern, and Central Asia. The third section, “Language in society and culture”, brings together articles on linguistic practices, language endangerment, and revitalisation.
We thank the peer reviewers of the articles for their meticulous work, which has been an invaluable part of preparing the Festschrift. We would also like to extend special thanks to Marina Temina, Anna Bugaeva and Hidetoshi Shiraishi for assistance with the Nivkh-language title of the volume, Juha Janhunen for
support in preparing this preface and Olesya Khanina for translating it into Russian, as well as Victoria Soyan Peemot for the photographs used in the book.
We hope that the photos collected from our shared journeys evoke warm memories in Katia, as they do for us. We also convey the wishes from Lotta Aunio, editor-in-chief of Studia Orientalia: “Thank you, Katia, for the past and future courses together and for the friendship!” Through the work done to compile this Festschrift, we, the editors, wish to express our appreciation for Katia as a researcher, teacher, colleague, supervisor, and friend. With the Nivkh-language title N'yng-dyuumgu, n'yng-ngafq, ‘our teacher, our friend’, we have sought to show our respect for Katia’s life’s work and the speakers of Nivkh. We sincerely hope that we have succeeded in this attempt and trust in Katia’s understanding, as well as the principle familiar to researchers of endangered languages, that ultimately, the most important thing is the motivation and courage to use the language.
