Hella Keem (also Hella Keem; 6 April 1915

Keema Ground meat, called mince or minced meat outside North America, is meat finely chopped by a meat grinder or a chopping knife. A common type of ground meat is ground beef, but many other types of meats are prepared in a similar fashion, inclu ...

, Vaabina Parish – 27 December 1997

Tartu Tartu is the second largest city in Estonia after Tallinn. Tartu has a population of 97,759 (as of 2024). It is southeast of Tallinn and 245 kilometres (152 miles) northeast of Riga, Latvia. Tartu lies on the Emajõgi river, which connects the ...

) was an

Estonia Estonia, officially the Republic of Estonia, is a country in Northern Europe. It is bordered to the north by the Gulf of Finland across from Finland, to the west by the Baltic Sea across from Sweden, to the south by Latvia, and to the east by Ru ...

n linguist and

ethnographer Ethnography is a branch of anthropology and the systematic study of individual cultures. It explores cultural phenomena from the point of view of the subject of the study. Ethnography is also a type of social research that involves examining ...

. From 1936 until 1943, she studied Estonian language, ethnography, and

Finno-Ugric languages Finno-Ugric () is a traditional linguistic grouping of all languages in the Uralic language family except for the Samoyedic languages. Its once commonly accepted status as a subfamily of Uralic is based on criteria formulated in the 19th centur ...

at the University of Tartu. Following the

German occupation of Estonia during World War II In the course of Operation Barbarossa, Nazi Germany invaded Estonia in July–December 1941, and occupied the country until 1944. Estonia had gained Estonian War of Independence, independence in 1918 from the then-warring German Empire, German ...

, Keem was arrested in 1943 and spent a year in prison. She was subsequently arrested in 1945 following the

Soviet occupation of Estonia The Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic, (abbreviated Estonian SSR, Soviet Estonia, or simply Estonia ) was an administrative subunit ( union republic) of the former Soviet Union (USSR), covering the occupied and annexed territory of Estonia ...

and spent fives years as a prisoner, released in 1950. From 1957 until 1993, she worked as a laboratory assistant at the Estonian SSR Academy of Sciences' Language and Literature Institute. Her main fields of research were Tartu and

Võro dialect Võro may refer to: * Võro people, an ethnic group of Estonia * Võro language, a language belonging to the Baltic-Finnic branch of the Finno-Ugric languages of Estonia * Võro Institute, the governing organization of the Võro language * Õilme ...

s. She was the most prolific dialect collector in Estonia: in total she created 223,000 labels of words, over 4000 pages of texts, and recorded 690 hours of sound recordings. Awards: * 1990: Wiedemann Language Award

Works

* Tartu murde tekstid. Eesti murded III (1970) * Tartumaa saja-aastaste jutud (1995) * Võru keel (1997) * Johannes Gutslaffi grammatika eesti keel ja Urvaste murrak (1998, in the book: J. Gutslaff. Grammatilisi vaatlusi eesti keelest) * Võru murde tekstid. Eesti murded VI (2002, with I. Käsi)

References

1915 births 1997 deaths Linguists from Estonia Estonian ethnologists Women linguists Estonian Finno-Ugrists University of Tartu alumni Estonian prisoners and detainees people from Võru Parish Linguists from the Soviet Union {{Estonia-linguist-stub