Bohuslav Havránek

Bohuslav Havranek ( born January 30, 1893 in Prague, † March 2, 1978 ) was a Czechoslovakian linguist and leading representatives of the Prague Linguistic Circle.

After graduation, he worked as a secondary school teacher and then completed his habilitation in 1928 with his work Genera verbi v slovanských jazycích ( " The Genera Verbi in the Slavic languages ​​"). In 1930 he became a professor at Masaryk University in Brno and taught there until the closing of Czech universities by the German occupation in 1939. From 1945 he was professor at the Charles University in Prague, and later Head of the Department of Czech language, phonetics and general Linguistics and Dean of the Faculty of Arts. From 1953 to 1961 he was rector of the Academy of Russian language and literature.

Havranek was in 1926 one of the founders of the Prague Linguistic Circle and was soon beside Vilém Mathesius, whose most important representatives of Czech. In 1935, he founded the linguistic journal Slovo a slovesnost. In 1952 he was academician and first director of the Institute for Czech Language of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences and remained so until 1965.

Havranek was a leading proponent of European structuralism, but also worked on the history of language and sociolinguistics. Especially important is his contribution to the theory of the standard languages ​​.