He is known for his work on the proposedDené–Yeniseian language family, seeking to establish that theKet language ofSiberia and therefore its broaderYeniseian family have a common linguistic ancestor with theNa-Dené languages ofNorth America. He began to study the Ket language in the 1990s, after thedissolution of theSoviet Union; he interviewed Ket speakers inGermany and later traveled toTomsk in southwestern Siberia to perform fieldwork. In August 2008 he became the first North American to visit the Ket homeland in north-central Siberia'sTurukhansky District, where he conducted intensive fieldwork with some of the remaining Ket speakers. Vajda's 67-page article "A Siberian link with Na-Dene languages" was published in 2010 in theAnthropological Papers of the University of Alaska. His theory has earned widespread, but not universal, support among professional linguists.[2]
Ket (Languages of the World/Materials Volume 204.) Munich: Lincom Europa, 2004.
Mid-Holocene Language Connections between Asia and North America. Leiden: Brill, 2022 (authors: Michael Fortescue and Edward Vajda)
Yeniseian Peoples and Languages: a history of their study with an annotated bibliography and a source guide. Surrey, England: Curzon Press, 2001. (389 pages)
Ket Prosodic Phonology. (Languages of the World 15.) Munich: Lincom Europa, 2000
Morfologicheskij slovar’ ketskogo glagola na osnove juzhnoketskogo dialekta [Morphological dictionary of the Ket verb, southern dialect] (co-authored with Marina Zinn), Tomsk: TGPU, 2004. (257 pages)
Russian Punctuation and Related Symbols (co-authored with V. I. Umanets), Bloomington, Indiana: Slavica Publishers, 2005. (249 pages)
Edited volumes
"Subordination and coordination strategies in North Asian languages."Current issues in linguistic theory, 300.) Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2008. (225 pp.)
Languages and Prehistory of Central Siberia. (Current issues in linguistic theory, 262.) Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2004. (275 pp.)
Studia Yeniseica: in honor of Heinrich Werner. Language typology and universals 56.1/2 (2003). Berlin: Akademie Verlag. (Co-edited with Gregory Anderson.)
Refereed journal articles
"Ket shamanism."Shaman 18.1/2: 125-143 (2010).
"A Siberian link with Na-Dene Languages."Anthropological Papers of the University of Alaska, Volume 5, New Series. (2010): 31-99.
"Yeniseian, Na-Dene, and Historical Linguistics."Anthropological Papers of the University of Alaska, Volume 5, New Series. (2010): 100-118.
"Dene–Yeniseian and Processes of Deep Change in Kin Terminologies."Anthropological Papers of the University of Alaska, Volume 5, New Series. (2010): 120-236. (co-authored with John W. Ives and Sally Rice)
"The languages of Siberia."Linguistic Compass 2 (2008): 1-19.
"Yeniseic diathesis"Language Typology 9 (2005): 327-339. (Review article of Die Diathese in den Jenissej-Sprachen aus typologischer Sicht, H. Werner).
"Ket verb structure in typological perspective."Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung 56.1/2 (2003): 55-92. Berlin: Akademie Verlag.
"The role of position class in Ket verb morphophonology."Word 52/3: 369-436 (2001).
"Actant conjugations in the Ket verb."Voprosy jazykoznanija [Linguistic Inquiry] 67/3 (2000): 21-41. Moscow: Nauka.
"Dene-Yeniseian". InOxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics. 2016.
"Loanwords in Ket."Loanwords in the World’s languages: a comparative handbook, eds. Martin Haspelmath and Uri Tadmor. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2009. pp. 471–494.
"Una relación genealógica entre las lenguas del Nuevo Mundo y de Siberia." (co-authored with Bernard Comrie)X Encuentro Internacional de Lingüística en el Noroeste: Memorias. 2009.
"Ditransitive constructions in Ket"The typology of ditransitives, ed. Bernard Comrie and Martin Haspelmath. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
"Siberian landscapes in Ket traditional culture."Landscape and culture in the Siberian North, ed. Peter Jordan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2009.
"Head-negating enclitics in Ket"Subordination and coordination strategies in North Asian languages, ed. Edward Vajda. 2008. Amsterdam & Philadelphia. pp. 179–201.
"Ket morphology" 2007.Morphologies of Asia and Africa, Vol. 2, ed. Alan Kaye, pp. 1277–1325. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns.
"Losing semantic alignment: from Proto-Yeniseic to Modern Ket"The typology of semantic alignment, eds. Tim Donohue & Soeren Wichman. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 140–161.
"Distinguishing referential from grammatical function in morphological typology."Linguistic diversity and language theories, ed. by Zygmunt Frajzyngier, David Rood, and Adam Hodges. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 2004. pp. 397–420.
"Tone and Phoneme in Ket."Current trends in Caucasian, East European and Inner Asian linguistics: Papers in Honor of Howard I. Aronson (Current issues in linguistic theory.), pp. 291–308. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2003.
"Toward a typology of position class: comparing Navajo and Ket verb morphology." Proceedings from the Fourth Workshop on American Indigenous LanguagesSanta Barbara Papers in Linguistics, 11, ed. Jeanie Castillo, pp. 99–114. Santa Barbara, CA: University of California, Santa Barbara. (2001).
"The origin of phonemic tone in Ket."Chicago Linguistics Society 37/2:Parasession on Arctic Languages, pp. 305–320. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.
"Kazakh Phonology."Opuscula Altaica: Essays Presented in Honor of Henry Schwarz, pp. 603–650. Western Washington University, 1994.
"A Critique of the Notion that Language Imprisons the Mind."Anthropological World: An Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, pp. 95–103, 1990.
