Anna Parzymies

Anna Parzymies (5 January 1939 – 14 August 2026) was a Polish arabist, doctor of oriental studies, and professor at Warsaw University.

Life and career Anna Parzymies was born in Sofia, Bulgaria on 5 January 1939. She finished secondary school and college there. During 1957–1962, she studied at the Faculty of Turkish Philology at the University of Sofia. In 1962, she received a Bulgarian government grant to study Arabic at the Bourguiba Institute of Modern Languages, Tunis El Manar University, Tunisia. In 1971, she received a master's degree at the Faculty of Foreign Languages at Warsaw University. In 1978, she was awarded a Ph.D. degree at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. Following habilitation in 1992, she was awarded a postdoctoral degree in the humanities, in the field of Turkic linguistics. Her main research interests include language contacts between Turkic and Slavic peoples and the cultures of Muslim communities.

She specialised in three areas of research: Islam in Europe (primarily as relates to the Maghreb minorities in France; Chechens, Ingush, Tatars, and other Muslim communities in the Russian Federation; Albanians and Bosnian Muslims in the Balkans); Arabic sociolinguistics and, in particular, the Turkish influences on spoken Arabic; Methodology of historical linguistics, with an emphasis on the Altaic language group. Parzymies was also the creator and founder of Dialog Academic Publishing, a Polish publishing company started in 1992. The company specializes in publications that are related to Africa and Asia or are written by authors from the area. Fiction published includes classical Sanskrit poetry, modern Chinese poetry, and novels written by North African authors. It has also published a number of European authors. A considerable part of its output is related to religion and Oriental languages.

Parzymies died on 14 August 2026, at the age of 87.

Awards and honours Parzymies was the founder of the Department of European Islam Studies at the Faculty of Oriental Studies of Warsaw University. In 2009, at a ceremony in Paris, she received the UNESCO-Sharjah Prize for Arab Culture. In 2018, she received an Ordre des Arts et des Lettres with the rank of Officier for the production of French works of art and literature.

Selected publications Anthroponymie algérienne. Noms de famille moderne d'origine turque, (PWN, 1985) Encyklopedia. Świat w przekroju 1988 [The world in 1988. Encyclopedia], (coauthor, Wiedza Powszechna, 1989) Język protobułgarski. Przyczynek do rekonstrukcji na podstawie porównań turecko-słowiańskich [A contribution to the reconstruction of the Bulgar language on the basis of Turkic-Slavic comparisons], (Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 1994) Język czuwaski [The Chuvash language], (Wydawnictwo Akademickie "Dialog", 2000).