Vuk Stefanović Karadžić

Who is Vuk Stefanović Karadžić?

Vuk Stefanović Karadžić was a Serbian philologist, linguist, and folklorist who almost single-handedly reformed the Serbian language and its Cyrillic alphabet in the early nineteenth century. Born in the village of Tršić, he studied under Serbian and Austrian tutors before joining the First Serbian Uprising, after which he fled to Vienna, where he was strongly influenced by the Slovene scholar Jernej Kopitar. Karadžić championed the principle that Serbian should be written as it is spoken by ordinary people, replacing the archaic Slavonic-Serbian literary language with a vernacular standard. He compiled the first modern Serbian dictionary, reformed the Cyrillic script into a phonetic thirty-letter alphabet, and collected vast anthologies of Serbian folk songs, tales, and proverbs directly from oral tradition, preserving them for future generations. His folk-song collections were admired by Jacob Grimm and translated across Europe. Karadžić's reforms met fierce resistance from the Serbian Orthodox establishment for decades but were eventually adopted as the foundation of the modern Serbian literary language, making him one of the most influential cultural figures in Serbian history.

Sources: Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, Srpski rječnik (Serbian Dictionary, 1818) · Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, Srpske narodne poslovice (Serbian Folk Proverbs, 1836/1849) · Duncan Wilson, The Life and Times of Vuk Stefanović Karadžić 1787-1864 (Oxford, 1970)