Axel Palmér

Axel Palmér is a historical linguist specializing in Indo-European languages. After undergraduate studies in Indology and Linguistics at Uppsala University he continued his studies at Leiden University, where he received his PhD in 2024 with a dissertation titled Indo-Slavic Lexical Isoglosses and the Prehistoric Dispersal of Indo-Iranian. 

Palmér’s research seeks to understand the diachronic development of the Indo-European languages, particularly the Indo-Iranian branch and its relationship to its European relatives. Beyond the development of the languages themselves, however, he focuses on reconstructing the prehistoric movements and interactions of the speakers of Indo-European languages by connecting linguistic evidence to real-world contexts with the help of archaeology and population genomics. His PhD dissertation traces the dispersal of the Indo-Iranian branch from Eastern Europe to Asia, starting from the disintegration of the Indo-European proto-language around 3000 BCE. His papers have appeared in international journals such as Indogermanische Forschungen, Indo-European Linguistics, and PLoS ONE. His co-authored paper “Indo-European cereal terminology suggests a Northwest Pontic homeland for the core Indo-European languages” (Kroonen et al., 2022) presents a new scenario of the early Indo-European dispersal, which has since received support from genetic studies.