Ranko Bugarski
Ranko Bugarski (2014)
Born	(1933-01-01)1 January 1933 (age 91) Sarajevo, Yugoslavia (now Bosnia and Herzegovina)
Relatives	Vesna Bugarski (sister)
Academic background
Alma mater	University of Sarajevo University of Belgrade (PhD)
Academic work
Discipline	Linguist
Institutions	University of Belgrade

Ranko Bugarski (Serbian Cyrillic: Ранко Бугарски) is a Serbian linguist, academic and author.

Life and career

He was born on 1 January 1933 in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, where he completed his secondary education and graduated in English and German languages and literatures at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Sarajevo (1957). After working for three years as a teacher of English at the Institute of Foreign Languages in his hometown, he was appointed by the Department of English, Faculty of Philology, University of Belgrade as a teaching assistant (1961), to progress through the academic hierarchy to the rank of Professor of English (1980). In 1988 he also became Professor of General Linguistics in the same institution, in a new department which he was instrumental in setting up. He retired in 2000 but remained academically active in different ways for many years thereafter.

He did postgraduate research at University College London with Professor Randolph Quirk as his adviser (1962/63) and was a visiting scholar at Columbia University, New York on a Ford Foundation scholarship (1966/67). After obtaining his Ph.D. degree from the University of Belgrade (1969) by defending a dissertation on a subsystem of English prepositions, he spent the academic year 1969/70 as a Fulbright lecturer at the University of Chicago and a visiting professor of linguistics at Northeastern Illinois State College, Chicago. In addition to courses or individual lectures at nearly all the universities of the former Yugoslavia, he was a guest lecturer at 24 other universities in Europe, the US and Australia (London, Oxford, Paris-Sorbonne, Leiden, Kraków, Vienna, Munich, Barcelona, New York-Columbia, California-Berkeley, Chicago, Cornell, Sydney-Macquarie, Melbourne-Monash, etc.).

Works and reception

As a researcher, lecturer and author he has been active in the fields of English and general linguistics, contrastive and applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, language policy and planning, language in relation to identity, culture, ethnicity and nationalism, language attitudes, written language and literacy, terminology and bibliography, translation theory, history of linguistics, the status of Serbo-Croatian,^[1] political manipulations of language and wartime hate speech, current Serbian slang, etc. He is the author of some twenty books, ten edited volumes, and scores of articles, book chapters and reviews in international journals, congress proceedings and other collective volumes, mostly in English or Serbo-Croatian but some in German, French, Spanish and several other languages. (For a selective list see below). Among his noted contributions are his early research on English prepositions, acknowledged as a thematic and methodological precursor of cognitive linguistics, his notion of graphic relativity as an extension of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic relativity, his role in defining and organising applied linguistics as an academic discipline in Yugoslavia and internationally, the conception of Serbo-Croatian as one polycentric standard language linguistically but several national languages politically, and his recent pioneering work on lexical blends in Serbian.^[1][2]

He has participated in several dozen Yugoslav, European and world congresses, symposia and other conferences, often also as an organiser or invited plenary speaker. He was the academic organiser of two international conferences at the University of London and editor (with Celia Hawkesworth) of their proceedings: Language Planning in Yugoslavia (Columbus, OH: Slavica, 1992. Pp. 233. ISBN 0-89357-232-2) and Language in the Former Yugoslav Lands (Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 2004. Pp. 325. ISBN 0-89357-298-5). He has edited scholarly journals and, as translator and editor, introduced to the Yugoslav public the works of some leading linguists (Chomsky, Sapir, Whorf) and modern linguistic disciplines (transformational-generative grammar, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics). At the same time, he has kept international audiences informed about the changing language situation in Yugoslavia and its successor states, with a special focus on the official dissolution of Serbo-Croatian. In 2017, he has signed the Declaration on the Common Language of the Croats, Serbs, Bosniaks and Montenegrins.^[3][4][5]

Some previous or current positions

Co-founder and first president, Yugoslav Association of Applied Linguistics; Vice President, Association Internationale de Linguistique Appliquée (AILA);^[6] President, Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE); corresponding member, Research Centre on Multilingualism (Brussels); national correspondent, Soziolinguistische Bibliographie Europäischer Länder, in the yearbook Sociolinguistica (Tübingen/Berlin); Council of Europe Expert on Regional or Minority Languages (Strasbourg); advisory board member, the journals Multilingua (Berlin/New York) and Historiographia Linguistica, with the associated book series Studies in the History of Linguistics (Amsterdam/Philadelphia); Yugoslav Board member, European Society for the Study of English (ESSE).

Other honours

Member, Academia Scientiarum et Artium Europaea (Salzburg);^[6] Honorary President, English-Speaking Union of Serbia; Honorary President, Applied Linguistics Association of Serbia; Honorary member, Association of Serbian Anglicists. He has been honoured with three festschrifts: (1) History and Perspectives of Language Study: Papers in Honor of Ranko Bugarski^[7] (eds O.Mišeska Tomić, M.Radovanović), Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2000. Pp. 305. ISBN 90-272-3692-5; (2) Jezik, društvo, saznanje - Profesoru Ranku Bugarskom od njegovih studenata [Language, Society, Cognition: For Professor Ranko Bugarski from his Students] (eds D.Klikovac, K.Rasulić), Beograd: Filološki fakultet, 2003. Pp. 300. ISBN 86-80267-67-8; (3) Jezik u upotrebi - primenjena lingvistika u čast Ranku Bugarskom/Language in Use: Applied Linguistics in Honour of Ranko Bugarski (ed. V.Vasić), Novi Sad/Beograd: Društvo za primenjenu lingvistiku Srbije, etc., 2011. Pp. 382. ISBN 978-86-6065-068-1 (bilingual Serbian/Croatian and English volume). His books Jezik i lingvistika (1972) and Jezik u društvu (1986) have won annual prizes, and in 2011 he was awarded the title "Vitez poziva" [Knight of his calling] by the NGO League of Experts-LEX.

Publications

Books

Most of the first twelve originally published by different publishing houses, thereafter all brought together in the edition of Ranko Bugarski's Selected Works (Belgrade: Čigoja štampa/XX vek, 1996–1997):

• Predlozi over, under, above, below i beneath u savremenom engleskom jeziku [The prepositions over, under, above, below and beneath in contemporary English] (1969, 2nd ed. 1996). Pp. vi+331. ID=47287308. /Ph.D. dissertation, with an English summary/.
• Jezik i lingvistika [Language and linguistics] (1972, 4th ed. 2003). Pp. 301. ID=49205772.
• Lingvistika o čoveku [Linguistics on man] (1975, 3rd ed. 1996). Pp. 218. ID=48322828.
• Jezik u društvu [Language in society] (1986, 3rd ed. 2004). Pp. 261. ID=49207052.
• Lingvistika u primeni [Linguistics in application] (1986, 3rd ed. 2007). Pp. 216. ID=48473612.
• Uvod u opštu lingvistiku [Introduction to general linguistics] (1989, 8th ed. 2013). Pp. 269. ID=48323084.
• Ka jedinstvu lingvistike [Towards unity in linguistics] (1997). Pp. 284. ID=56979468.
• Jezik u kontekstu [Language in context] (1997). Pp. 298. ID=57560588.
• Jezici [Languages] (1993, 6th ed. 2010). Pp. 144. ISBN 978-86-7558-757-6. /Macedonian translation, Skopje, 2001/.
• Pismo [Writing] (1996, 3rd ed. 2010). Pp. 190. ISBN 978-86-7558-641-8. /Macedonian translation, Skopje, 2001/.
• Jezik od mira do rata [Language from peace to war] (1994, 3rd ed. 1997). Pp. 142. ID=52929292. /Greek translation, Athens, 2011/.
• Jezik u društvenoj krizi [Language in a social crisis] (1997). Pp. 168. ID=57789708.

This set was followed by nine further books, all except the last on the list published by Biblioteka XX vek of Belgrade:

• Lica jezika – sociolingvističke teme [Facets of language: Sociolinguistic topics] (2001, 2nd ed. 2002). Pp. 246. ISBN 86-81493-80-9.
• Nova lica jezika – sociolingvističke teme^[7] [New facets of language: Sociolinguistic topics] (2002, 2nd ed. 2009). Pp. 262. ISBN 978-86-7562-014-3.
• Žargon – lingvistička studija [Slang: A linguistic study] (2003, 2nd ed. 2006). Pp. 295. ISBN 86-7562-056-X.
• Jezik i kultura [Language and culture] (2005). Pp. 288. ISBN 86-7562-040-3.
• Evropa u jeziku [Europe in language] (2009). Pp. 246. ISBN 978-86-7562-085-3.
• Jezik i identitet [Language and identity] (2010). Pp. 279. ISBN 978-86-7562-093-8.
• Portret jednog jezika [Portrait of a language] (2012). Pp. 278. ISBN 978-86-7562-103-4.
• Sarmagedon u Mesopotamaniji – leksičke skrivalice [Sarmageddon in Mesopotamania: Lexical blends] (2013). Pp. 207. ISBN 978-86-7562-110-2.
• Selektivna sociolingvistička bibliografija: SFRJ/SRJ-SCG/Srbija, 1967–2007 [Selective sociolinguistic bibliography of Yugoslavia/Serbia, 1967–2007] (2009). Beograd: Narodna biblioteka Srbije. Pp. 124. ISBN 978-86-7035-203-2.

Representative sample of articles and book chapters