Johanna Nichols is a professor emerita Linguist in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research interests include the Slavic languages, the linguistic prehistory of northern Eurasia, language typology, ancient linguistic prehistory, and languages of the Caucasus, chiefly Chechen and Ingush. Nichols's best known work, Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time, won the Linguistic Society of America's Leonard Bloomfield Book Award for 1994.