Alexander (Sasha) Vladimirovich Vovin was born on January 27, 1961 and raised in Saint Petersburg in a multi-ethnic and multilingual family. His maternal grandfather Ya’akov (1901–1990) was trilingual in German, Yiddish and Russian, and his maternal grandmother Alexandra (1908–1975) was bilingual in French and Russian, but the common language was Russian, and due to the harsh realities of the Stalinist era – his maternal grandfather was sent to the GULAG as a “German and Japanese spy” and spent almost seven years there – they raised their two children (Alexander’s mother Svetlana (Sophia) Vovin (1937–2018), an underground poet, was the youngest) as Russian monolinguals. Alexander grew up as a monolingual, too, but from a young age he was influenced by his maternal grandfather’s love for foreign languages, and he was taught English and French by private tutors from an early age as well. It is not quite clear who his father was, but the prevalent legend assigns the parenthood to Vladimir Sandler, the inventor of the printing machine for Samizdat publications (illegal publications in the former USSR), while another theory (much less credible, in Alexander’s opinion) attributes it to Iosif Brodskii, the famous Soviet poet who was forced to emigrate.
Alexander, who had been studying Ancient Greek, Latin and Hebrew (the latter two by himself and Ancient Greek under the guidance of Aleksandr K. Gavrilov), upon graduating from high school in 1978, tried to enter first the Department of Persian and Arabic, and then the Classical Department in Saint Petersburg (then Leningrad) State University, but was intentionally failed on the entrance exams as a person of partial Jewish descent. Only due to the intervention of his maternal uncle, Prof. Dr. Ruslan Y. Vovin, then the chief psychiatrist of Saint Petersburg, was he admitted to the Department of Structural and Applied Linguistics and not drafted into the Soviet Army. But as Alexander often said, it was a blessing in disguise, for two reasons: first, besides English, both Japanese and French were taught in the Department. English was obligatory, but Alexander found it to be uninteresting. Therefore, he chose Japanese, and as he later said, that was the most important decision he made before his twentieth birthday. The second one, no less important, was meeting Leonard G. Herzenberg, an Iranist and an Indo-Europeanist, and studying Indo-European linguistics and various ancient Indo-European languages under his guidance. The influence of Herzenberg was the most profound on Alexander during his university years. It was also Herzenberg who directed him to the study of East Asian linguistics. There was a famous dialogue between the two at the end of Alexander’s first year at the University:
Herzenberg: “Sasha, what do you intend to study in the future?”
Alexander: “Indo-European linguistics, of course!”
Herzenberg: “But you should keep in mind that only details remain there. Look at some much less studied language or family.”
Alexander: “And which one would you recommend?”
Herzenberg: “Probably Chinese – it has some exciting developments recently.”
It was also Herzenberg who introduced Alexander to Sergei Ye. Yakhontov, one of the world’s leading specialists on Chinese historical linguistics at that time. So, Alexander embarked on the study of Chinese, both modern and Classical, parallel to his study of Japanese. But his heart was never captured by Chinese, since in general he did not like languages with no more than rudimentary morphology (the only exception is Thai, but that happened only many years later), so he stuck mostly to Japanese as the primary object of his research, although his interests and erudition in various languages were impressive even early on. One of his colleagues told me the following anecdote. During a seminar on general phonetics, L. Bondarko, the leading Russian phonetician, made a statement that the velar nasal [ŋ] can never occur as an initial in a word.
Alexander: “And what about Vietnamese Nguyen?”
Bondarko: “Vietnamese is a monosyllabic language, they have completely different phonetics.”
Alexander: “Are Nenets and Ewenki monosyllabic languages?”
Bondarko: “No, certainly not.”
Alexander: “Then what about Nenets ŋano ‘boat’, Ewenki ŋālǝ ‘hand’, etc.?”
Upon graduating from the University in 1983 with an MA degree in general linguistics and Japanese historical linguistics (there was no BA/MA split in the USSR at that time) with a thesis on Japanese transcriptions of Sanskrit, Alexander went to work at the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts (then the Institute of Oriental Studies, Leningrad Branch) and started his doctoral program a year later. His academic advisor was Irina T. Zograf, a Sinologist specializing in the history of Middle and Early Mandarin Chinese, who taught him a great deal about Chinese language history and about the art of academic writing. This art was also taught to him by E. Temkin, the Indologist. His other teachers during his years at the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts were Sergei Ye. Yakhontov for Old Chinese, Lev N. Men’shikov for Tang period Chinese (both vernacular and classical), Vladislav N. Goregliad for Classical Japanese and premodern Japanese cursive writing, and Margarita E. Vorobieva-Desiatovskaia for Indic paleography. Alexander also self-taught himself Korean, Ainu, Manchu, Turkish, Finnish, and Chuvash during this period. He defended his PhD in October of 1987 at the age of twenty-six, being probably one of the youngest PhDs at the Institute of Oriental Studies in more than half a century. He always regretted that he did not steal the announcement from the Institute information bulletin board that had the following text: “Alexander Vovin, a PhD graduate student of the second year, is to be dismissed from the Graduate School due to the defense of his dissertation”. His doctoral dissertation was on the language of the Hamamatsu chūnagon monogatari, a Classical Japanese novel from the eleventh century, which was years later considerably rewritten, expanded and published as A Reference Grammar of Classical Japanese Prose in 2003 by Routledge. Apart from two monographs published by Routledge and University of Hawai’i Press, Alexander has always closely cooperated first with Global Oriental and then Brill, both of whom he personally found a real pleasure to work with, and where he published most of his books, as well as being a chief editor of the book series Languages of Asia and one of the editors and two co-founders (with Juha Janhunen) of the International Journal of Eurasian Linguistics.
In 1986 he went to participate in his first International conference, the Permanent International Altaistic Conference held in Tashkent. It was his first trip to Central Asia, which led to two significant events. First, he came back stunned by the marvels of Samarkand, and this deepened his interest in Turkic linguistics. And second, he met Ross King there, then a graduate student at Harvard, and now a Professor of Korean at the University of British Columbia, who organized his escape from the USSR to the USA in 1990.
During his last years at the Institute of Oriental Studies Alexander started to do field work in addition to his research on ancient languages and manuscripts. His field work centered on Ingermanland, Chuvash, and the so-called “Soviet” Korean language in the Leningrad region, Chuvash Republic, Saint Petersburg, and Kazakhstan. But he became fed up with the situation after he was not allowed to go to Japan or even North Korea, notwithstanding the perestroika years, and the fact that most of his writings, like his translation into Russian of the Hamamatsu chūnagon monogatari, were neatly stored in his drawers but were refused publication. These circumstances further strengthened his resolve to emigrate, and he asked Ross King to find him any suitable position anywhere in the West. Finally, with further help from the late Samuel E. Martin and Robert Austerlitz, the University of Michigan invited Alexander for an interview for a position in Japanese language and linguistics in March 1990. On his flight to Detroit, he had to change planes in Frankfurt, and he often told the story that his feeling after he landed in Frankfurt was that he landed on Mars: so different were the Western airports from the ones in the USSR. The interview was really “Veni, vidi, vici”, and very shortly after Alexander received a job offer, which he accepted, and decided not to return to the USSR ever again (however, he went back to Russia in 2016 for a conference in Moscow and then took a one-week trip to Saint Petersburg with his family). A new life had started, and it was not long until Alexander finally made his first trip to Japan in 1992. He worked at three universities in the USA: the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor Michigan (1990–1994), Miami University in Oxford, Ohio (1994–1995), and finally, landing in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, where he spent nineteen years (1995–2014), temporarily interrupted by positions as a visiting professor at the International Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto (2001–2002 and 2008–2009), the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics in Tachikawa, Japan (2012), and the Japanese Department at the University of Bochum, Germany (2009–2010). He was unofficially invited to stay in Bochum as the Head of the Department, but while he loved the University and his colleagues there, he complained of German xenophobia and the everyday life in Germany, so, for the time being he decided to go back to Hawai’i. However, after a few years in Hawai’i it was not long before he set his sights on moving to Europe once again. His chance came in 2014 when he was offered a position at École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), which he gladly accepted.
Soon after moving to France a significant recognition came with his election to the Academia Europaea as a European Academician in 2015, and the highest possible prize for a foreign scholar in Japan from the National Institute for Humanities in the same year. This was followed by the award of a five-year grant (2.47 million euros) from the European Research Commission to support work on his Etymological Dictionary of the Japonic languages in 2018.
His most important works are probably A Descriptive and Comparative Grammar of Western Old Japanese in two volumes (first edition: Global Oriental, 2005 and 2009, second edition: Brill, HdO series, 2020), the most detailed grammar of this language written in any language (including Japanese), and his ongoing translation of the Man’yōshū (
But the major discovery of his life, as Alexander says himself, is in Mongolic linguistics: the identification of the language of Brāhmī inscriptions on Khüis Tolgoi (early seventh century CE) and Bugut (586 CE) stelae as an early form of Mongolic. Many of his colleagues compare the importance of this discovery to the decipherment and identification of Runic inscriptions of Mongolia as Old Turkic at the end of the nineteenth century.
Besides Japanese and Mongolic, Alexander is also well-known for his research on Ainu, Korean, Tungusic, and Turkic languages, as well as on transcriptions partially attested in Chinese and other languages of Inner Asia. In particular, he managed to demonstrate that the famous Xiong-nu couplet in Chinese transcription is in a Yeniseian language.
He was married twice: first to Varvara G. Lebedeva-Vovina (née Churakova), with whom they have a son, Aleksei, born in 1982, and the second time to Sambi Ishisaki-Vovin (née Sambi Ishisaki (
His current house is in the quaint village of Poligny, located in the south of Seine-et-Marne department in Melun prefecture, about 100 km to the south of Paris. He has his own study, and the whole house is draped in books on various languages of his interest as well as on their cultures, literature, history, archeology, mythology, and religions: Japonic, Koreanic, Chinese, Tibeto-Burman (especially modern and Classical Tibetan, Tangut, and Burmese), Tungusic, Mongolic, Kradai, Austroasiatic, Austronesian, Ainu, Nivx, Yeniseian, Chukchi-Koryak, Kamchadal, Uralic, Semitic, Kartvelian, Indo-European (especially Old and Middle Iranian, Tocharian, Sanskrit, and Ancient Greek), Eskimo, Aleut, and various American Indian languages, such as Mayan, Athabaskan, and Algonquian.
Several generations of graduate students studied under his tutelage in Japanese, Korean, and Manchu historical linguistics, the majority at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa in Honolulu, but also several at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. Throughout his academic career he taught various languages in addition to modern Japanese: Classical Japanese, Old Japanese, modern Korean, Middle Korean, Middle Mongolian, Old Turkic, Manchu, Classical Chinese, Classical Tibetan, and Ainu, as well as various courses on the historical linguistics of East and Central Asia.
He used to be a supporter of the ‘Altaic’ hypothesis, but gradually changed his views between 1999 and 2003, coming to the conclusion that the so-called ‘Altaic’ languages (Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, Koreanic, and Japonic) are not demonstrably genetically related. As a result, he turned into one of the most active critics of the ‘Altaic’ theory, publishing many review articles and his own articles on this debate. Since in his opinion the debate is closed, he lost interest in it, also due to the fact that he is much more interested in language contact, homelands (in particular the homeland of Japonic, which he believes was located in South-Central China) and migrations as opposed to far-fetched hypotheses about genetic relationships. This led him into completely new fields, mainly Kradai historical linguistics and also Austroasiatic historical linguistics. He is currently looking into the traces of language contact between Japonic and these two language families, while maintaining his current position that, as he says: “Japonic is Japonic. It is not demonstrably related to any other language or language family on the globe”.
Many new research projects are close at hand or looming at the horizon. As of the middle of 2020, he was finishing a book on the Bussokuseki-no uta, a stone inscription from 753 CE presently found in the Yakushiji temple in Nara. It is done in his usual manner: a careful edition of the original text, with a transcription, linguistic analysis, and a translation followed by a detailed commentary. Although his travel plans have been postponed by the current COVID-19 pandemic, when it is safe and practicable he is planning to go back to Mongolia and Japan to take 3D photos of various inscriptions, since at least one more Mongolian inscription in Brāhmī must be documented, as well as many other inscriptions in Old Turkic and Chinese. Basically, he is planning, together with Mehmet Ölmez, to create a new atlas of early inscriptions in Mongolia. Needless to say, his Man’yōshū translation project must be brought to a completion as well. Since he lived in five different countries (the former USSR, the USA, Japan, Germany and France) through many turbulent moments in recent history, he started work on a book titled Reminiscences. In addition, he plans to publish a book on the early ethnolinguistic history of the Japanese archipelago and a volume containing his Russian and English poetry and short stories and essays in English.