Ranko Matasović

Matasović was born and raised in Zagreb, where he attended primary and secondary school. In the Faculty of philosophy at the University of Zagreb he graduated in linguistics and philosophy, receiving an M.A. in linguistics in 1992 and a Ph.D. in 1995 under the supervision of Radoslav Katičić with the thesis A Theory of Textual Reconstruction in Indo-European Linguistics. He has received research fellowships at the University of Vienna (1993) and the University of Oxford (1995), a post-doctoral Fulbright Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin during 1997/1998 (with Andrew Sihler as an advisor), and also an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation fellowship at the University of Bonn in 2002/2003.

He currently holds a chair in the Department of Linguistics in the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb, where he teaches courses on comparative Indo-European grammar, Celtic studies, and language typology. His research interests include comparative Indo-European grammar (especially of Celtic and Balto-Slavic languages), language typology and syntax, and Latin, Celtic, and Hittite philology. He has contributed to the Indo-European Etymological Dictionary project organized by Leiden University with his Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Celtic. He has also published works on Armenian and Albanian, including the Arbanasi speech of the Albanian diaspora near Zadar.

In 2002 he received an award from the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts for a lasting contribution to philology. In 2006 he became an associate member of the same institution and was promoted into a full member in 2012.[1]

• Harfa sa sjevera. Iz irske književnosti (Zagreb: Antibarbarus, 1995) ISBN 953-6160-25-0
• A Theory of Textual Reconstruction in Indo-European Linguistics (Frankfurt a/M & New York: Peter Lang, 1996) ISBN 3-631-49751-2
• Kratka poredbenopovijesna gramatika latinskoga jezika (Zagreb: Matica hrvatska, 1997) ISBN 953-150-105-X
• Kultura i književnost Hetita (Zagreb; Matica hrvatska, 2000) ISBN 953-15-0548-9
• Uvod u poredbenu lingvistiku (Zagreb: Matica hrvatska, 2001) ISBN 953-150-612-4
• Kamen kraljeva. Srednjovjekovne irske sage (Zagreb: Ex Libris, 2004) ISBN 953-6310-35-X
• Gender in Indo-European (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 2004) ISBN 3-8253-1666-1
• Jezična raznolikost svijeta (Zagreb: Algoritam, 2005) ISBN 953-220-355-9
• Poredbenopovijesna gramatika hrvatskoga jezika (Zagreb: Matica hrvatska, 2008.) ISBN 978-953-150-840-7
• Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Celtic (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2009) ISBN 978-90-04-17336-1
  • “Addenda et corrigenda to Ranko Matasović’s Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Celtic (Brill, Leiden 2009)” (Zagreb, 2011).
• A Reader in Comparative Indo-European Religion (Zagreb: Univ of Zagreb, 2010)
• Slavic Nominal Word-Formation: Proto-Indo-European Origins and Historical Development (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 2014) ISBN 978-3-8253-6335-2

He has published more than 100 papers in Croatian and foreign-language journals and translated various works from Latin, Ancient Greek, Lithuanian, Hittite, Old and modern Irish, Welsh, and English.

• Personal web page of Ranko Matasović
• (in Croatian) A Conversation with R. Matasović, Vijenac, November 6, 2008