Ivo Pranjković

Ivo Pranjković (August 17, 1947) is a Croatian linguist.

He was born in Kotor Varoš in Bosnia and Herzegovina. After the classical secondary school in Visoko, he received a BA degree in the Croatian language from the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Zagreb. In 1974 he became a member of the department for Croatian at the same faculty. Today, he is a professor of standard Croatian language.

As a learned linguist and philologist with a wide spectrum of interests, Pranjković made important contributions to several linguistic areas. His syntactic studies "Croatian Syntax", "Second Croatian Syntax" and "Croatian grammar" (published in co-authorship with Josip Silić) are very important works for the modern Croatian syntax. Other areas of his work are general linguistics, history of Croatian philology in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and the linguistic heritage of Bosnian Franciscans. This last topic was the subject of several studies of Pranjković, as well as the book "Croatian Language and the Bosnian Franciscans", where he described the linguistic area which was crucial for the development and standardization of the Croatian language, but which was greatly neglected until his work.

Aside from linguistic theory and history, Pranjković engaged in many disputes and comments in the press, especially with his great rival, Stjepan Babić. His articles have been collected in several books. Pranjković has polemicized with virtually every Croatian linguist of the older generation. The only thing he shares with Babić is his aversion towards amateurish linguistic purism and pro-Serbian linguists.

As a versatile linguist, Pranjković made important contributions to stylistics.

Works

*"August Musić", 1989
*"Adolfo Veber Tkalčević", 1993
*"Kronika hrvatskoga jezikoslovlja" (Chronology of Croatian Linguistics), 1993
*"Hrvatska skladnja" (Croatian Syntax), 1993
*"Lingvistički komentari" (Linguistic Comments), 1997
*"Jezikoslovna sporenja" (Linguistic Disputes), 1997
*"Hrvatski jezik i franjevci Bosne Srebrene" (Croatian Language and the Bosnian Franciscans), 2000
*"Druga hrvatska skladnja" (Second Croatian Syntax), 2001
*"Jezik i beletristika" (Language and Belles Lettres), 2003
*"Gramatika hrvatskoga jezika" (Croatian Grammar), co-author, 2006