Brigitte Pakendorf

Brigitte Pakendorf (born 1970) is a linguist and geneticist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS).

Education After receiving her MA in biological anthropology in 1996, Pakendorf studied for two doctorates: one in biology, one in linguistics. She received the former in 2001 from the University of Hamburg and the latter in 2007 from the University of Leiden. This second thesis brought together her interests in dealing with contact in the prehistory of the Sakha, or Yakuts, from both linguistic and genetic perspectives. It received the 2008 prize for the best dissertation in linguistics defended at a Dutch university, awarded jointly by the Dutch Association for General Linguistics (AVT) and Association for Applied Linguistics (Anéla).

Career and honours From 2006 to 2012 Pakendorf was leader of a Max Planck Society junior research group on Comparative Population Linguistics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. In 2012 she took up a position as senior researcher (DR2) at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in the laboratory Dynamique du langage (Language dynamics). She was promoted to senior researcher first class (DR1) in 2016, and exceptional class (DRCE) in 2018. In 2019 she was elected member of the Academia Europaea.

Research Pakendorf's research is interdisciplinary, bridging biology, anthropology and linguistics. She works on languages of Siberia, in particular Even, Negidal and other Tungusic languages.

Selected publications Pakendorf, Brigitte and Mark Stoneking. 2005. Mitochondrial DNA and human evolution. Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics 6, 165–183, Pakendorf, Brigitte, Innokentij N. Novgorodov, Vladimir L. Osakovskij, Al'bina P. Danilova, Artur P. Protod'jakonov and Mark Stoneking. 2006 Investigating the effects of prehistoric migrations in Siberia: genetic variation and the origins of Yakuts. Human Genetics 120, 334–353. Pickrell, Joseph K., Nick Patterson, Chiara Barbieri, Falko Berthold, Linda Gerlach, Tom Güldemann, Blesswell Kure, Sununguko Wata Mpoloka, Hirosi Nakagawa, Christfried Naumann, Mark Lipson, Po-Ru Loh, Joseph Lachance, Joanna Mountain, Carlos D. Bustamante, Bonnie Berger, Sarah A. Tishkoff, Brenna M. Henn, Mark Stoneking, David Reich and Brigitte Pakendorf. 2012. The genetic prehistory of southern Africa. Nature Communications 3, 1143. Pickrell, Joseph K., Nick Patterson, Po-Ru Loh, Mark Lipson, Bonnie Berger, Mark Stoneking, Brigitte Pakendorf, and David Reich. 2014. Ancient west Eurasian ancestry in southern and eastern Africa. Biological Sciences 111 (7) 2632–2637. Pakendorf, Brigitte, Nina Dobrushina and Olesya Khanina. 2021. A typology of small-scale multilingualism. International Journal of Bilingualism 25 (4).