Son of Alexander Plungian (1924—2019), air engineer and interpreter, a friend of Yuri Knorozov and Valentin Berestov.

In 1982, Vladimir Plungian graduated from the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics of the Philological faculty of the Moscow State University.

During his student years, he took part in a number of linguistic field trips organized by the department, in particular those which studies Tabasaran, Andi, Chamalal languages of Dagestan.

Plungian acquired his Candidate Degree in 1987 at the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the topic of his work being Morphological derivation and inflection in the verbal system of an agglutinative language (based on Dogon data) (supervisor: Natalia Okhotina).

In 1998, he obtained his Doctoral Degree at the Moscow State University, with the thesis Grammatical categories, their counterparts and substitutes.

and conducted fieldwork in Africa (Mali), Dagestan, Armenia, northern parts of Russia, in the Volga region and Pamir.

On the basis of this course, he wrote a textbook General morphology: introduction (1st ed., 2000), which remains his most cited book according to Google Scholar.