Vladimir Alpatov

Head of Department of Languages of East and Southeast Asia
Chief Researcher, Research Center on Ethnic and Language Relations

Works at the Institute of Linguistics since 2012.

Vladimir Alpatov is an outstanding scholar in the fields of general and oriental linguistics. He is one of the leading Russian specialists in the history of linguistics.

Vladimir Alpatov graduated from the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics of the Faculty of Philology of the Lomonosov Moscow State University in 1968. In 1971, he passed his PhD thesis defense ("Grammatical system of politeness in modern literary Japanese") at the Institute of Oriental Science of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Vladimir Alpatov worked at the Insitute of Oriental Studies since November 1971. In 1983, he completed his Dr.habil. thesis "Issues of morpheme and word in modern Japanese". In 1994, he was appointed Deputy Director of the Institute of Oriental Studies. Vladimir Alpatov became a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2008. From 2012 till 2017, he held the position of Director of the Institute of Linguistics. 

Since 1993, Vladimir Alpatov has been teaching the history of linguistics at the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics at MSU. 

Vladimir Alpatov is the member of the Presidental Council for the Russian Language. 

Research

Vladimir Alpatov studies oriental languages, namely Japanese. He contributed to the collective monograph "Parts of speech. Theory and typology". In his PhD and Dr.habil. theses, Alpatov looks into general theoretical issues of the nature of words and morphemes, grammatical categories, agglutination, and some other phenomena of general morphology and theoretical grammar.

Vladimir Alpatov's major research interests include the history of linguistics, especially the history of Russian linguistics. He is one of the most prominent scholars in that field. Vladimir Alpatov is the author of a textbook on the history of linguistics studies which briefly covers the discipline from its emergence till the second half of the XX century. Just as important are the works of Alpatov on the history of Soviet linguistics. He studied Mikhail Bakhtin's and Valentin Voloshin's linguistic theories. Along with Fyodor Achnin, he concerned himself with the fate of many Slavic and Turkic specialists during the Great Purge of 1937. Alpatov also wrote on Nicholas Marr's character and his Japhetic theory. Intended for a wide range of readers, the works of Vladimir Alpatov are of high importance for the life of the academic community of the world.

Vladimir Alpatov's works on the linguistic situation in Japan, as well as on the USSR's language policy, cannot be overlooked, too. One finds the sociolinguistic aspect of his research in such books as "Japonija. Jazyk i občšestvo" [Japan. Language and society] and "150 jazykov i politika: 1917–1997" [150 languages and politics: 1917–1997].

He also published major works on general linguistics, including the ones concerning the theory of parts of speech. He is the author and compiler of the collective monograph "Parts of Speech. Theory and typology".

He is also known as the author of many linguistic tasks and one of the compilers of the collection "Linguistic tasks".

Science Index

Selected publications