Boris Ataev

Boris Makhachevich Ataev was born on 19 July 1957 in the village of Khunzakh, in the Khunzakh district of the Dagestan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. He studied at Tbilisi State University, graduating from the Caucasian languages department of the philology faculty in 1979. From 1979 to 1981 he worked as a correspondent for the newspaper Dagestan University. He completed postgraduate study in Caucasian languages at the Institute of Linguistics of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow, and in 1985 he defended his candidate dissertation, a comparative analysis of pronouns in the Avar-Andi-Tsez languages.

In May 1985 Ataev joined the Gamzat Tsadasa Institute of History, Language and Literature of the Dagestan branch of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Makhachkala, which later became the Institute of Language, Literature and Art of the Dagestan Federal Research Centre. He worked there as junior research fellow (1985 to 1992), senior research fellow (1992 to 2002), leading research fellow (2002 to 2014) and chief research fellow. He headed the department of source studies and scientific information from 2004 to 2008 and was deputy director for research from 2018 to 2019.

In 1998 he defended his doctoral dissertation on the formation and development of the Avar literary language at the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, and in 2001 he became a professor. His research covered the historical morphology of the Avar-Andi-Tsez languages, the history of literary Avar and of its study, the interaction of Dagestan's languages with Russian in a multi-ethnic setting and the sociolinguistic problems of Dagestan's small languages. He wrote around 300 scholarly works.

His books included a Russian-Avar phrasebook (1992), a self-teaching course in Avar (1996), a study of the morphology of the Avar-Andi-Tsez languages (1996), a history of the study of Avar (1997), the monograph Avar Language written with Mikhail Alekseev (1998), Avars: Language, History, Writing (2005), Minority Languages of Dagestan (2012) and Languages and Dialects of Dagestan (2023). He contributed to a Russian-Avar dictionary of more than 40,000 words and translated Cyril Graham's work on Avar with an English-Avar dictionary (2014).

He wrote the draft programme for preserving and developing the languages of the peoples of Dagestan (1997). He was deputy editor in chief of the institute's journal from 2018 and sat on the editorial boards of several other journals, the expert council on philology of Russia's Higher Attestation Commission from 2022, and Dagestan's government commission on terminology and spelling for the republic's languages from 2023. He also sat on the academic council of the Dagestan branch of the Russian Geographical Society.

Ataev was an Avar from Khunzakh and devoted much of his work to his native language. He was a member of the Union of Journalists of Russia from 1980 and chaired the presidium of the charitable organisation Heritage in Makhachkala. Details of his family life have not been widely published.

Boris Ataev died suddenly in Makhachkala on 26 October 2026, aged 69. The Dagestan Federal Research Centre of the Russian Academy of Sciences, where he worked as chief research fellow at the Institute of Language, Literature and Art, announced his death the following day. No cause of death was made public.

Ataev is remembered as one of the principal modern scholars of Avar, the most widely spoken language of Dagestan, and as an advocate for the survival of the republic's many smaller languages. His grammars, teaching books and histories of the literary language remain standard references, and his 1997 programme helped shape Dagestan's policy on its national languages. His honours included the Golden Eagle prize of the Union of Journalists of Dagestan (2008), a certificate of honour from the Russian Academy of Sciences (2014) and the title Veteran of Labour (2015).