Anna Parzymies (b. on 5 January 1939 in Sofia) – a Polish arabist, doctor of oriental studies, professor at Warsaw University. She specializes 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.
Anna Parzymies finished secondary school and college in Sofia. In the years 1957–1962, she studied at the Faculty of Turkish Philology at the University of Sofia, named after St. Clement of Ohrid (Софийски университет "Св. Климент Охридски"). In 1962, she received a Bulgarian government grant to study Arabic at Bourguiba Institute of Modern Languages (Institut Bourguiba des Langues Vivantes) in Tunis. In 1971, she received a master's degree at the Faculty of Foreign Languages at Warsaw University. In 1978, she was awarded a PhD degree at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. 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.
Academic achievements, awards, and honours
Professor Anna Parzymies, PhD is 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.
Anna Parzymies is the creator and founder of DIALOG Academic Publishing, a Polish publishing company founded in 1992. The company specializes in publications devoted to the Orient. Most of the publications are related to Africa and Asia or are written by authors from the area (the Oriental fiction published so far includes classical Sanskrit poetry, modern Chinese poetry, and novels written by North African authors). Recently, it has published a number or European (Russian, Finnish, French, and Swedish) authors. A considerable part of its publications is related to religion and Oriental languages.
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).
Anna Parzymies in the Polish Science Database (OPI)
Biographical note on the web site of the Faculty of Oriental Studies of Warsaw University
