Vuk Stefanović Karadžić (Вук Стефановић Караџић) (November 7, 1787 - February 7, 1864) was a Serb linguist and major reformer of the Serbian language.

Vuk Stefanović Karadžić

Karadžić was born in the village of Tršić , near Loznica in Serbia; his first name "Vuk" means "wolf". Apart from learning to read and write in the Tronoša monastery he educated himself. He took part in Serbian uprisings against Ottoman occupation and left us detailed accounts of them.

Karadžić reformed the Serb language and standardized the Serb Cyrillic alphabet by following strict phonemic principles. (In everyday usage, but less accurately, his alphabet is often termed a phonetic alphabet.) This made it one of the most usable in the world.

Kardžić's reforms of Serbian modernized the language and distanced it from Church Slavonic, instead bringing it closer to its close neighbour Croatian (in whose spoken čakavian dialect a large body of literature was written in the Italian Renaissance). Austrian authorities encouraged the merging of the two languages, and together with Đuro Daničić, Karadžić was the main Serbian signer of the Vienna Agreement of 1850 which laid the foundation for the later Serbo-Croatian language.

He collected several tomes of folk prose and poetry and created all the works listed below. For his work he received little financial aid, at times living in poverty. He died in Vienna.

Major works

• Primer of Serbian language (1814)
• Dictionary of Serbian language (1st ed. 1818, 2nd ed. 1852)
• New Testament (translation to Serbian language) (1st partial ed.1824, 1st complete ed. 1847, 2nd ed. 1857)
• Serbian folk tales (1821, 1853, 1870 and more)
• Serbian epic poetry (1845 and more)
• Deutsch-Serbisches Wörterbuch (German-Serbian Dictionary) 1872
• (more)

Quotation

Write as you speak and read as it is written. [The essence of modern Serbian spelling]

In Serbian: Пиши као што говориш и читај како је написано (Piši kao što govoriš i čitaj kako je napisano)

External links

• Vuk's Foundation (in Serbian)