Mate Kapović (born August 5, 1981 in

Zagreb Zagreb ( , , , ) is the capital and largest city of Croatia. It is in the northwest of the country, along the Sava river, at the southern slopes of the Medvednica mountain. Zagreb stands near the international border between Croatia and Slov ...

) is a Croatian

linguist Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...

specializing in

Indo-European The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Dutc ...

Slavic languages The Slavic languages, also known as the Slavonic languages, are Indo-European languages spoken primarily by the Slavic peoples and their descendants. They are thought to descend from a proto-language called Proto-Slavic, spoken during the ...

and the

Proto-Balto-Slavic language Proto-Balto-Slavic (PBS or PBSl) is a reconstructed hypothetical proto-language descending from Proto-Indo-European (PIE). From Proto-Balto-Slavic, the later Balto-Slavic languages are thought to have developed, composed of sub-branches Baltic ...

. He studied Croatian language and linguistics at the Faculty of Arts of

University of Zagreb The University of Zagreb ( hr, Sveučilište u Zagrebu, ; la, Universitas Studiorum Zagrabiensis) is the largest Croatian university and the oldest continuously operating university in the area covering Central Europe south of Vienna and all of ...

. He graduated in 2003 and he has been teaching at the same university since 2004. In 2007, he obtained his doctorate at the Faculty of Philosophy of

University of Zadar The University of Zadar ( hr, Sveučilište u Zadru, la, Universitas Studiorum Iadertina) is a university located in Zadar, Croatia. The university in its present form was founded in 2002, but can trace its lineage to 1396, thus making it the ol ...

(''Reconstruction of Balto-Slavic Personal Pronouns with Emphasis on Accentuation''). In 2010, he was appointed

docent The title of docent is conferred by some European universities to denote a specific academic appointment within a set structure of academic ranks at or below the full professor rank, similar to a British readership, a French " ''maître de con ...

at the University of Zagreb, and in 2014, he was appointed associate professor. At the Faculty of Arts, he lectures on general

phonology Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a ...

, historical-comparative linguistics, phonology and Indo-European

morphology Morphology, from the Greek and meaning "study of shape", may refer to: Disciplines * Morphology (archaeology), study of the shapes or forms of artifacts * Morphology (astronomy), study of the shape of astronomical objects such as nebulae, galaxies ...

. His academic interests include

accentology Accentology involves a systematic analysis of word or phrase stress. Sub-areas of accentology include Germanic accentology, Balto-Slavic accentology, Indo-European accentology, and Japanese accentology. See also *Proto-Slavic accent Proto-Slavic ...

sociolinguistics Sociolinguistics is the descriptive study of the effect of any or all aspects of society, including cultural Norm (sociology), norms, expectations, and context (language use), context, on the way language is used, and society's effect on languag ...

dialectology Dialectology (from Greek , ''dialektos'', "talk, dialect"; and , '' -logia'') is the scientific study of linguistic dialect, a sub-field of sociolinguistics. It studies variations in language based primarily on geographic distribution and their ass ...

and language policy. He is a member of the Committee of Dialectology at the Department of Philological Sciences of the

Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts The Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts ( la, Academia Scientiarum et Artium Croatica, hr, Hrvatska akademija znanosti i umjetnosti, abbrev. HAZU) is the national academy of Croatia. HAZU was founded under patronage of the Croatian bishop J ...

. He has authored the following books: ''Uvod u indoeuropsku lingvistiku: Pregled jezikâ i poredbena fonologija'' (2008), ''Čiji je jezik?'' (2011), ''Povijest hrvatske akcentuacije: Fonetika'' (2015). In 2019, he coauthored ''Jeziku je svejedno'' (2019), a book devoted to the phenomenon of prescriptivism in Croatian linguistics. He has published numerous articles in Croatian and international journals. He is engaged in criticism of linguistic purism and prescriptivism. He was the initiator of the annual conference International Workshop on Balto-Slavic Accentology (IWoBA).

Selected works

* ''Uvod u indoeuropsku lingvistiku: Pregled jezikâ i poredbena fonologija'' (2008) * ''O „pravilnosti” u jeziku'' (2009) * ''Čiji je jezik?'' (2011) * ''Language, ideology, and politics in Croatia'' (2011) * ''Ogledi o kapitalizmu i demokraciji'' (2015) * ''Povijest hrvatske akcentuacije: Fonetika'' (2016) * ''O preskripciji i preskriptivizmu u Hrvatskoj'' (coauthor, 2016) * ''The Indo-European Languages'' (ed., 2nd edition) * ''Jeziku je svejedno'' (coauthor, 2019)

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Kapović, Mate Linguists from Croatia University of Zagreb faculty 1981 births University of Zagreb alumni Living people