(born Nov. 6, 1787, Tr&shacek;ić, Serbia, Ottoman Empire—died Feb. 6, 1864, Vienna) Serbian language scholar and folklorist.
He was largely self-taught as a writer. After the failure of a Serb revolt against Turkish rule, he left for Vienna (1813), where he was introduced to formal scholarship by the Slavist Jernej Kopitar. In 1814 he published a grammar of Serbian (&see; Serbo-Croatian language) and in 1818 a dictionary; both promulgated a reformed Cyrillic alphabet and a new literary language based on colloquial Serbian rather than the prevailing literary language, which mixed archaic Serbian with Russian Church Slavic (&see; Old Church Slavonic language). After decades of resistance and polemicizing, the renascent Serbian state accepted his reforms in 1868.
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