| Birth Name: | Helma Everdina van den Berg |
| Birth Date: | 26 May 1965 |
| Birth Place: | Veenendaal, Netherlands |
| Death Place: | Derbent, Dagestan, Russia |
| Occupation: | Linguist, translator |
| Awards: | VIDI Innovation Fellowship |
| Alma Mater: | Leiden University |
| Discipline: | Linguistics |
| Sub Discipline: | Caucasian languages |
| Workplaces: | Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology |
Helma Everdina van den Berg (May 26, 1965 – November 11, 2003) was a Dutch linguist specializing in Caucasian languages.
Van den Berg was born and raised in Veenendaal, the Netherlands.[1] [2] She earned her PhD from Leiden University from 1983 to 1988. In addition to being a linguist, van den Berg was an accredited translator of Russian and Polish. After earning her doctorate, she remained in Leiden as research fellow from 1995 to 2000, studying the verbal morphology and syntax of Dargi, another East Caucasian language.
In 2000, Helma joined the Linguistics Department of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, where she became recognized as the resident specialist in Caucasian, especially Daghestanian, languages, some of which remain unwritten.
Van den Berg did field work on several under-documented East Caucasian languages, especially Hunzib and Dargi. She produced a Hunzib reference grammar and a collection of Dargi folktales with accompanying sketch grammar.
At the time of her death, van den Berg was working on a grammar of the Avar language. She had also just received a VIDI Innovation Fellowship from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, "which would have enabled her to set up her own research group to conduct research into Caucasian languages and to train a new generation of specialists in these languages during the period 2004–2009."[3]
Her former colleagues have made an effort to bring van den Berg's research to print if it remained unpublished after her sudden death.
Van den Berg was married to Leo Vogelenzang. She died in Derbent, Daghestan, Russia of a heart attack at 38 years of age while she was conducting fieldwork with native-speaker collaborators.
Van den Berg published many papers.[4]