Mari Uusküla (until July 1, 2005 Mari Bogatkin; born January 23, 1980) is an Estonian linguist.
Early life and education Uusküla is the daughter of the ceramist Georg Bogatkin and the paternal granddaughter of the artists Vladimir Bogatkin and Valli Lember-Bogatkina. She is the maternal granddaughter of the sculptor Endel Taniloo.
Uusküla graduated from in 1998 and from the University of Tartu's Faculty of Arts and Humanities in 2003, majoring in Hungarian. Both her master's thesis and doctoral dissertation were supervised by Urmas Sutrop at the University of Tartu. She defended her dissertation, Basic Colour Terms in Finno-Ugric and Slavonic Languages: Myths and Facts, in 2008 at the Department of General Linguistics.
Career Uusküla teaches psycholinguistics, anthropological linguistics, semantics, and pragmatics at Tallinn University. She has taught at several other European universities, in Roskilde, Verona, Milan, and Budapest. She is the head of the Western European Studies program at Tallinn University's Institute of Humanities, where she is an associate professor of linguistics and translation studies. She is the head of the Department of Language History, Dialects, and Finno-Ugric Languages at the Institute of the Estonian Language. Much of her research has focused on linguistic aspects of colors.
Publications 2008: Basic Colour Terms in Finno-Ugric and Slavonic Languages: Myths and Facts 2011: Värvinimede raamat (A Book of Color Names) 2015: "Applying Points-of-View Analysis to Individual Variations in Colour Sorting Data," in Journal of Cognition and Culture 15 2016: Color Language and Color Categorization (coeditor) 2020: "When Does 'Bright' Mean 'Prototypical'? Color-Term Modifiers in Eight European Languages, Examined with Color-Survey Data," in: Journal of the Optical Society of America 37 2023: "Is Purple Lost in Translation? The Affective Meaning of Purple, Violet, and Lilac Cognates in 16 Languages and 30 Populations," in: Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 52 2023: "Translation of Color Language," in: Encyclopedia of Color Science and Technology (Cham: Springer), pp. 1531–1535 2024: "The Purple Mystery: Semantic Meaning of Three Purple Terms in French Speakers from Algeria, France, and Switzerland" (coauthor), in: Color Research & Application 49
Awards and recognitions 2000: Estonian National Culture Foundation Scholar 2020: Professor of the Year, Tallinn University School of Humanities 2021: Achiever of the Year, School of Humanities of Tallinn University 2021: Estonian Science Communication Award (incentive prize)
References