Alitet Nikolaevich Nemtushkin was born on the 12th of November 1939 in a camp of nomadic hunters in the Irkutsk Oblast, in Siberia. He was brought up in a boarding school and by his grandmother Ogdo-Evdokiya Ivanovna Nemtushkina. After graduating from the Gertsen Leningrad Pedagogical Institute he began working as a correspondent for the newspaper "Krasnoyarsk worker" in the Evenkia national Area. In 1961 he became the editor of Evenkia radio and worked as a journalist more than 20 years. His first book of verses "The morning in taiga" was published in 1960 in Krasnoyarsk. In 1986 Nemtushkin was elected as the secretary-in-chief of Krasnoyarsk writers' organization. In 1990 he was awarded with the title of 'Honoured worker of culture"; in 1992 he was given the State Premium of Russian Federation for literature. He died in November 2006. "My Language" has been widely quoted, especially in UNESCO reports and publications dealing with cultural and linguistic diversity.