Tomislav Maretić

Tomislav Maretić (13 October 1854 – 15 January 1938) was a Croatian linguist and lexicographer.

He was born in Virovitica, where he attended primary school and the gymnasium in Varaždin, Požega and Zagreb. He graduated in 1878, receiving a diploma in classical and Slavic philology at the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb.

He worked as a high school teacher in Požega from 1879 to 1881 and in Zagreb from 1881 to 1885. He received his doctorate in 1883, and from 1886 taught Slavic philology at the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb. That same year, he went on a one-year study stay in Leipzig and Prague. He retired in 1914, but returned to the faculty to teach Indo-European Studies between 1919 and 1924.

In 1890 he became a full member of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, and served as its president from 1915 to 1918. He was a member of parliament of the Unionist Party twice for five years.

Maretić was a polyglot with a wide education, a prolific linguist, the main representative of the so-called Croatian Vukovars, responsible for the consistent codification of Novoštokavian as a literary language and for the introduction of phonological orthography, advocating for the linguistic unity of Croatian and Serbian.

Maretić's grammar was for most of the 20th century the foundation of the Croatian language norm and the main language manual for generations of pupils and students. Criticized immediately after its publication because it was not based on Croatian literature but mainly on folk songs and works by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić and Đura Daničić, this grammar was, for its time, the most comprehensive description of classical Novoštokavian language.

He died in Zagreb. Provided by Wikipedia