Helma van den Berg

Helma van den Berg (May 26, 1965 – November 11, 2003) was a linguist specializing in Caucasian languages. Van den Berg was born in Veenendaal, the Netherlands, and died in Derbent, Daghestan, Russia.[1][2] She earned her PhD from Leiden University. In addition to being a linguist, van den Berg was an accredited translator of Russian and Polish. Van den Berg did field work on two under-documented East Caucasian languages: Hunzib and Dargi, producing a Hunzib reference grammar and a collection of Dargi folktales with accompanying sketch grammar. At the time of her death, van den Berg was the resident specialist of Caucasian languages at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig and was working on a grammar of Avar. She was also the recipient of a VIDI Innovation Fellowship from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research.[3]