LINGUISTS from Croatia

Top 4

The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the most legendary Croatian Linguists of all time. This list of famous Croatian Linguists is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography’s online popularity.

1. Vatroslav Jagić (1838 - 1923)

With an HPI of 57.09, Vatroslav Jagić is the most famous Croatian Linguist.  His biography has been translated into 19 different languages on wikipedia.

Vatroslav Jagić (Serbo-Croatian pronunciation: [ʋâtroslaʋ jǎːɡitɕ]; July 6, 1838 – August 5, 1923) was a Croatian scholar of Slavic studies in the second half of the 19th century.

2. Tuone Udaina (1821 - 1898)

With an HPI of 56.66, Tuone Udaina is the 2nd most famous Croatian Linguist.  His biography has been translated into 30 different languages.

Tuone Udaina (1823 – 10 June 1898; Antonio Udina in Italian) was the last known speaker of Dalmatian, a Romance language that evolved from Latin along the eastern coast of the Adriatic Sea. He was the main source of knowledge about his parents' dialect, that of the island of Krk, for the linguist Matteo Bartoli, who recorded it in 1897. Udaina bore the nickname Burbur, the etymology of which is uncertain. Bartoli tentatively associated it with burbero, an Italian word for a surly, gruff, or ill-tempered person. Other interpretations include "barbarian" and "barber". He worked as a marine postman and as a sexton. Vegliot Dalmatian was not Udaina's native language, as he had learned it from listening to his parents' private conversations. Udaina had not spoken the Dalmatian language for nearly 20 years before the time he acted as a linguistic informant. No sound recordings were ever made. When Udaina was killed at 74 in an explosion during road work on 10 June 1898, the Dalmatian language is generally assumed to have become extinct as no other speakers of the language were found or known to have lived.

3. Matteo Bartoli (1873 - 1946)

With an HPI of 51.73, Matteo Bartoli is the 3rd most famous Croatian Linguist.  His biography has been translated into 20 different languages.

Matteo Giulio Bartoli (22 November 1873 – 23 January 1946) was an Italian linguist from Istria (then a part of Austria-Hungary, today part of modern Croatia). He obtained a doctorate at the University of Vienna, where his adviser was Wilhelm Meyer-Lübke, in 1898. He was influenced by certain theories of the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce and the German linguist Karl Vossler. He later also studied with Jules Gilliéron in Paris. From Gilliéron he acquired a penchant for fieldwork, and from 1900 on, he published numerous dialectological studies of Istrian dialects. In 1907, he became professor of the comparative history of classical and neo-Latin languages in the Faculty of Letters at the University of Turin, where he served until his death. His study on the Dalmatian language, Das Dalmatische (2 vol. 1906) is the only known complete description of the language, which is now extinct. It remains "the standard work on Dalmatian", and contains every known text in the language. Bartoli used data gathered in 1897 from the last speaker of Dalmatian, Tuone Udaina, who was killed in an explosives accident on 10 June 1898. He also wrote Introduzione alla neolinguistica ("Introduction to neolinguistics", 1925) and Saggi di linguistica spaziale ("Essays in spatial linguistics", 1945) and was the teacher of Antonio Gramsci.

4. Ranko Matasović (b. 1968)

With an HPI of 28.57, Ranko Matasović is the 4th most famous Croatian Linguist.  His biography has been translated into 17 different languages.

Ranko Matasović (Croatian pronunciation: [râːŋko matǎːsoʋitɕ]; born 14 May 1968) is a Croatian linguist, Indo-Europeanist, and Celticist.