Mate Kapović

Mate Kapović (born August 5, 1981 in Zagreb) is a Croatian linguist specializing in Indo-European, Slavic languages and the Proto-Balto-Slavic language.^[1][2]

Mate Kapović
Born	(1981-08-05) August 5, 1981 (age 43) Zagreb, Croatia
Occupation	linguist

Biography

He studied Croatian language and linguistics at the Faculty of Arts of University of Zagreb. He graduated in 2003^[2] and he has been teaching at the same university since 2004.^[2] In 2007, he obtained his doctorate at the Faculty of Philosophy of University of Zadar (Reconstruction of Balto-Slavic Personal Pronouns with Emphasis on Accentuation).^[2][3]

In 2010, he was appointed docent at the University of Zagreb, and in 2014, he was appointed associate professor.^[4] At the Faculty of Arts, he lectures on general phonology, historical-comparative linguistics, phonology and Indo-European morphology. His academic interests include accentology, sociolinguistics, dialectology and language policy.^[5] He is a member of the Committee of Dialectology at the Department of Philological Sciences of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts.^[6]

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),^[1][7] a book devoted to the phenomenon of prescriptivism in Croatian linguistics.^[8][9][10] He has published numerous articles in Croatian and international journals.^[3] He is engaged in criticism of linguistic purism and prescriptivism.^[11][7] He was the initiator of the annual conference International Workshop on Balto-Slavic Accentology (IWoBA).^[3]

Kapović proposed revisions and changes to the Declaration on the Common Language prior to its publication, but stated that "they were mostly not respected" and as a result did not sign the document. He criticized the document for posturing as 'neutral', 'apolitical' and 'non-ideological'.^[12] He participated on a panel discussion on the Declaration in Zagreb.^[13]

Politically, Kapović is a leftist activist who co-founded the Workers' Front. In the 2017 Zagreb local elections, Kapović was elected as the party's first rotating representative in the Zagreb Assembly, being followed by Katarina Peović.^[14] He was the party's nominee for the 2021 Zagreb local elections, but was ultimately not re-elected.^[15]

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)^[16]
• The Indo-European Languages (ed., 2nd edition)^[17]
• Jeziku je svejedno (coauthor, 2019)^[7][16]