Henryk Jankowski

Short Biography

Henryk Jankowski received his MA (1980) in Turkish and Hungarian from the University of Budapest, and his PhD (1986) in General and Ural-Altaic Linguistics from Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, where he presently teaches. He also taught at the University of Budapest in 1991–1993. His interest includes now Turkic languages with other languages in contact, with particular focus on Karaim (Turkic Karaite) and Kazakh. He co-translated an eighteenth-century Polish Tatar Kitab into Polish (2000) and authored many papers on Crimean Tatars, Tatars of Eastern Europe and Eastern European Karaites. Among his articles there are critical editions of manuscripts and old documents. His major work is A Historical-Etymological Dictionary of Pre-Russian Habitation Names of the Crimea (2006). In his books and papers, Henryk Jankowski tries to discover the unknown culture of Turkic-speaking peoples as documented in old manuscripts, and to analyse its contents in a comparative perspective.