Ranko Bugarski () 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, 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. 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. ) and Language in the Former Yugoslav Lands (Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 2004. Pp. 325. ). 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.