Svetlana Burlak

Svetlana Burlak, Cyrillic Светлана Анатольевна Бурлак, (b. June 12, 1969) is a Russian linguist, PhD (1995), an Indo-European scholar and an author of works on comparative linguistics and on the genesis of human language. She participated regularly in the intellectual quiz What? Where? When? since 1995 to 2006 in Ilya Itkin’s team.

Senior researcher of Institute for Oriental Studies of Russian Academy of Sciences and a tocharist. Burlak has composed many linguistic problems, she has also written several manuals and popular science publications. She is one of the permanent professors of Summer linguistic school and of Summer ecological school. She graduated from the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics of the Faculty of Philology of MSU in 1991. Her major works include articles and books on Comparative linguistics and on tocharistics, researches the genesis of human language. Since 1996 she gives lectures in the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics of the Faculty of Philology of MSU on the comparative linguistics. Burlak has issued about 20 articles and books, including the “Historical phonology of the Tocharian languages” and the manual “Comparative linguistics” (jointly with Sergei Starostin).