Juha Janhunen (born 12 February 1952 in Pori,

Finland Finland ( fi, Suomi ; sv, Finland ), officially the Republic of Finland (; ), is a Nordic country in Northern Europe. It shares land borders with Sweden to the northwest, Norway to the north, and Russia to the east, with the Gulf of B ...

) is a Finnish linguist whose wide interests include

Uralic The Uralic languages (; sometimes called Uralian languages ) form a language family of 38 languages spoken by approximately 25million people, predominantly in Northern Eurasia. The Uralic languages with the most native speakers are Hungarian (w ...

and Mongolic languages. Since 1994 he has been Professor in East Asian studies at the

University of Helsinki The University of Helsinki ( fi, Helsingin yliopisto, sv, Helsingfors universitet, abbreviated UH) is a public research university located in Helsinki, Finland since 1829, but founded in the city of Turku (in Swedish ''Åbo'') in 1640 as the ...

. He has done fieldwork on

Samoyedic languages The Samoyedic () or Samoyed languages () are spoken around the Ural Mountains, in northernmost Eurasia, by approximately 25,000 people altogether. They derive from a common ancestral language called Proto-Samoyedic, and form a branch of the Urali ...

and on

Khamnigan Mongol Khamnigan is a Mongolic language spoken east of Lake Baikal. The Khamnigan people, called the ''Horse Tungus'' or ''Steppe Tungus'', are natively bilingual, speaking both a Mongolic and a Tungusic language, which are inherited from their mixe ...

. More recently he has collaborated with Chinese scholar Wu Yingzhe to produce a critical edition of two newly discovered

Liao Dynasty The Liao dynasty (; Khitan language, Khitan: ''Mos Jælud''; ), also known as the Khitan Empire (Khitan: ''Mos diau-d kitai huldʒi gur''), officially the Great Liao (), was an Dynasties in Chinese history, imperial dynasty of China that exi ...

epitaphs written in the

Khitan small script The Khitan small script () was one of two writing systems used for the now-extinct Khitan language (the other was the Khitan large script). It was used during the 10th–12th century by the Khitan people, who had created the Liao Empire in presen ...

. He is a critic of the Altaic hypothesis.

Notable works

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References

External links

Janhunen and Altaic studies profiled
1952 births Living people People from Pori Swedish-speaking Finns Linguists from Finland Linguists of the Khitan language Mongolists Finnish Finno-Ugrists Finnish orientalists Academic personnel of the University of Helsinki {{Finland-linguist-stub