Karadžić, Vuk Stefanović

Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, (born Nov. 6, 1787, Tršić, Serbia, Ottoman Empire [now in Serbia]—died Feb. 6, 1864, Vienna [Austria]), language scholar and the father of Serbian folk-literature scholarship, who, in reforming the Cyrillic alphabet for Serbian usage, created one of the simplest and most logical spelling systems.

Karadžić learned to read and write in the old monastery Tronosha (near his native village). Mostly in the position of a scribe to different military leaders, sometimes as schoolteacher, he served his country during the first Serbian uprising against the Turks (1804–13). At the collapse of the uprising he left Serbia, but, instead of following Karadjordje and other leaders to Russia, he went to Vienna. There he was introduced to Slavic scholarship by Bartholomäus Kopitar, a government official and scholar from Slovenia, and was encouraged to collect poems and folk songs and to write a grammar of the popular Serbian language and a dictionary.

Karadžić established that Serbian contains 30 distinct sounds, for six of which the Cyrillic alphabet had no special letters. He introduced new letters for those sounds, at the same time discarding 18 letters for which Serbian had no use. In 1818 he first published his Srpski rječnik (“Serbian Lexicon”), a Serbian-German-Latin dictionary containing 26,270 words and many important sidelights on folklore. The second edition (1852), expanded to about 47,000 words, remains a classic. Though there was strong opposition to his reform from the church and from writers, the Serbian government in 1868 finally adopted Karadžić’s amended alphabet. Karadžić’s work influenced some 19th-century Croatian language codifiers (see Serbo-Croatian language).

In his effort to collect folk literature, Karadžić traveled throughout Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia, and other areas of the region. The results of his travels appeared largely in Srpske narodne pjesme, 4 vol. (1823–33; “Serbian Folk Poems”). Other works include a book of popular stories (1821), a collection of Serbian proverbs (1837), and a Serbian translation of the New Testament (1847).