Edward J. Vajda is a historical linguist at Western Washington University. He has become known for his work on the proposed Dené–Yeniseian language family, seeking to establish that the Ket language of Siberia has a common linguistic ancestor with the Na-Dené languages of North America. He began to study the Ket language in the 1990s, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union; he interviewed Ket speakers in Germany and later traveled to Tomsk in southwestern Siberia to perform fieldwork. In August 2008 he became the first North American to visit the Ket homeland in north-central Siberia's Turukhansky District, where he conducted intensive fieldwork with some of the remaining Ket speakers. Vajda's 67-page article "A Siberian link with Na-Dene languages" has been published in 2010 in the Anthropological Papers of the University of Alaska. His theory has earned widespread, but not universal, support among professional linguists.
Publications
;Monographs
Ket Munich: Lincom Europa, 2004.
Yeniseian Peoples and Languages: a history of their study with an annotated bibliography and a source guide. Surrey, England: Curzon Press, 2001.
Ket Prosodic Phonology. Munich: Lincom Europa, 2000
Russian Punctuation and Related Symbols, Bloomington, Indiana: Slavica Publishers, 2005.
;Edited volumes
"Subordination and coordination strategies in North Asian languages." Current issues in linguistic theory, 300.) Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2008.
Languages and Prehistory of Central Siberia. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2004.
Studia Yeniseica: in honor of Heinrich Werner.Language typology and universals 56.1/2. Berlin: Akademie Verlag.
;Refereed journal articles
"Ket shamanism." Shaman 18.1/2: 125-143.
"A Siberian link with Na-Dene Languages." Anthropological Papers of the University of Alaska, Volume 5, New Series. : 31-99.
"Yeniseian, Na-Dene, and Historical Linguistics." Anthropological Papers of the University of Alaska, Volume 5, New Series. : 100-118.
"Dene–Yeniseian and Processes of Deep Change in Kin Terminologies." Anthropological Papers of the University of Alaska, Volume 5, New Series. : 120-236.
"The languages of Siberia." Linguistic Compass 2 : 1-19.
"Yeniseic diathesis" Language Typology 9 : 327-339..
"Ket verb structure in typological perspective." Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung 56.1/2 : 55-92. Berlin: Akademie Verlag.
"The role of position class in Ket verb morphophonology." Word 52/3: 369-436.
"Actant conjugations in the Ket verb." Voprosy jazykoznanija 67/3 : 21-41. Moscow: Nauka.
;Book chapters or encyclopedia articles
"Loanwords in Ket." Loanwords in the World’s languages: a comparative handbook, eds. Martin Haspelmath and Uri Tadmor. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2009. pp. 471–494.
"Una relación genealógica entre las lenguas del Nuevo Mundo y de Siberia." X Encuentro Internacional de Lingüística en el Noroeste: Memorias. 2009.
"Siberian landscapes in Ket traditional culture." Landscape and culture in the Siberian North, ed. Peter Jordan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2009.
"Head-negating enclitics in Ket" Subordination and coordination strategies in North Asian languages, ed. Edward Vajda. 2008. Amsterdam & Philadelphia. pp. 179–201.
"Ket morphology" 2007. Morphologies of Asia and Africa, Vol. 2, ed. Alan Kaye, pp. 1277–1325. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns.
"Losing semantic alignment: from Proto-Yeniseic to Modern Ket" The typology of semantic alignment, eds. Tim Donohue & Soeren Wichman. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 140–161.
"Distinguishing referential from grammatical function in morphological typology." Linguistic diversity and language theories, ed. by Zygmunt Frajzyngier, David Rood, and Adam Hodges. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 2004. pp. 397–420.
"Tone and Phoneme in Ket." Current trends in Caucasian, East European and Inner Asian linguistics: Papers in Honor of Howard I. Aronson, pp. 291–308. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2003.
"The origin of phonemic tone in Ket." Chicago Linguistics Society 37/2: Parasession on Arctic Languages, pp. 305–320. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.
"Kazakh Phonology." Opuscula Altaica: Essays Presented in Honor of Henry Schwarz, pp. 603–650. Western Washington University, 1994.
