Aleksandar Belić (

Serbian Cyrillic The Serbian Cyrillic alphabet ( sr, / , ) is a variation of the Cyrillic script used to write the Serbian language, updated in 1818 by Serbian linguist Vuk Karadžić. It is one of the two alphabets used to write standard modern Serbian, th ...

: Александар Белић, ; 15 August 1876 – 26 February 1960) was a Serbian linguist and academic.

Biography

Belić was born in

Belgrade Belgrade ( , ;, ; names in other languages) is the capital and largest city in Serbia. It is located at the confluence of the Sava and Danube rivers and the crossroads of the Pannonian Plain and the Balkan Peninsula. Nearly 1,166,763 mi ...

. After studying

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 ...

in Belgrade, Odessa, and Moscow, he received his PhD at

Leipzig University Leipzig University (german: Universität Leipzig), in Leipzig in Saxony, Germany, is one of the world's oldest universities and the second-oldest university (by consecutive years of existence) in Germany. The university was founded on 2 December ...

in 1900. He worked at the

University of Belgrade The University of Belgrade ( sr, / ) is a public university in Serbia. It is the oldest and largest modern university in Serbia. Founded in 1808 as the Belgrade Higher School in revolutionary Serbia, by 1838 it merged with the Kragujevac-ba ...

and Belgrade Higher School during his academic career. He was a member and longtime president of the

Serbian Academy of Sciences The Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts ( la, Academia Scientiarum et Artium Serbica, sr-Cyr, Српска академија наука и уметности, САНУ, Srpska akademija nauka i umetnosti, SANU) is a national academy and the ...

. His membership lasted between 1937 and 1960 with the interruption in the 1941-1944 period of the

Axis occupation of Serbia During World War II, several provinces of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia corresponding to the modern-day state of Serbia were occupied by the Axis Powers from 1941 to 1944. Most of the area was occupied by the Wehrmacht and was organized as separate t ...

when he was suspended. Belić is generally considered the leading Serbian linguist of the first half of the twentieth century. His research dealt with comparative Slavic studies, general linguistics,

Serbo-Croatian Serbo-Croatian () – also called Serbo-Croat (), Serbo-Croat-Bosnian (SCB), Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (BCS), and Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian (BCMS) – is a South Slavic language and the primary language of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia an ...

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 syntax. He authored ''Pravopis srpskohrvatskog književnog jezika'' (Standard Serbo-Croatian Normative Guide, 1923) which was based on a strictly phonological spelling principle. He wrote extensively on

Čakavian Chakavian or Čakavian (, , , sh-Latn, čakavski proper name: or own name: ''čokovski, čakavski, čekavski'') is a South Slavic regiolect or language spoken primarily by Croats along the Adriatic coast, in the historical regions of Dalmat ...

and

Kajkavian Kajkavian (Kajkavian noun: ''kajkavščina''; Shtokavian adjective: ''kajkavski'' , noun: ''kajkavica'' or ''kajkavština'' ) is a South Slavic regiolect or language spoken primarily by Croats in much of Central Croatia, Gorski Kotar and no ...

dialects and made a significant contribution to Slavic accentology with his discovery of the Slavic neoacute accent in Čakavian. Belić introduced the tripartite division of Kajkavian based on the reflexes of

Proto-Slavic Proto-Slavic (abbreviated PSl., PS.; also called Common Slavic or Common Slavonic) is the unattested, reconstructed proto-language of all Slavic languages. It represents Slavic speech approximately from the 2nd millennium B.C. through the 6th ...

''*tj'' and ''*dj'', which was first published in Stanojević's ''Narodna enciklopedija srpsko-hrvatsko-slovenačka'' (Serbo-Croatian-Slovene National Encyclopedia, 1927), although disproved by later dialectology studies. He contributed to the acceptance of the so-called Belgrade style of standard Serbian. During his entire life he was a consistent advocate of a unified Serbo-Croatian language. Belić's collected works have been published in 14 volumes in 1999. He died in Belgrade.

Selected works

*''Dijalekti istočne i južne Srbije'' *''Dijalektološka karta srpskog jezika'' *''Akcentske studije'' *''O dvojini u slovenskim jezicima'' *''Galički dijalekt'' *''O jezičkoj prirodi i jezičkom razvitku'' (1941) *''Pravopis srpsko-hrvatskog književnog jezika'' (1923)

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Belic, Aleksandar 1876 births 1960 deaths Linguists from Serbia People from the Kingdom of Serbia People of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia Imperial Moscow University alumni Burials at Belgrade New Cemetery Rectors of the University of Belgrade Members of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts