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Raimo Raag. The Linguistic and Language Planning Activities of Valter Tauli |
2007, nr. 11 |
Valter Tauli is one of the internationally
best known Estonian linguists, renowned, in the first place, for
being one of the founding fathers of the sociolinguistic subdiscipline
of language planning. He was born in Tallinn on 13 November 1907,
graduated from the University of Tartu in 1931, earned his living
as an upper secondary school teacher at Jakob Westholm Private
Gymnasium in Tallinn until 1939, when he became a holder of a
scholarship and got a post as assistent at Tartu University. In
1944 he fled to Sweden, where he first became an archive worker
at Uppsala University, then holder of a scholarship and a research
fellow, defended his doctoral thesis "Phonological Tendencies
in Estonian" at Lund University in 1956, and finally, in
1962, was employed as senior lecturer (docent) in Estonian at
Uppsala University whence he retired in 1973. He died in Uppsala
on 3 January 1986. The main thread in Tauli's scholarly activities
is language planning, as manifested in, inter alia, his
first monograph "Principles and Methods of Correct Usage
and Language Planning" (Tartu, 1938), written in Estonian
with a summary in French, and in "Introduction to a Theory
of Language Planning" (Uppsala, 1968; in English and Estonian).
In several articles he introduced the Estonian language reform
of the early 20th century to the international scholarly public.
Besides his devotion to language planning in general and Estonian
language reform in particular, he took great interest in structural
tendencies of languages, published the first frequency dictionary
of Estonian (in 1964) and wrote a grammar of Standard Estonian
(two volumes; in Estonian and English), descriptive in its angle
of approach, but also containing several proposals for changing
the norms of the standard language. Tauli published more than
one hundred scholarly works in English, Estonian, German, Russian,
Spanish, Swedish, Finnish, and Hungarian. Last but not least,
Tauli was a leading figure in the field of cultural activities
of Estonians in exile.
Keywords: Valter Tauli, biography,
history of the humanities, language planning, Estonian grammar,
structural development of language, Estonians in exile.
Raimo Raag (b. 1953), PhD, Uppsala University,
Department of Modern Languages, professor of Finno-Ugric Languages
Raimo.Raag[at]moderna.uu.se
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