Zbigniew Gołąb

Who is Zbigniew Gołąb?

Zbigniew Gołąb was a Polish American linguist and Slavist. He was described as "one of the world's greatest experts on the Macedonian language and the leading expert on Macedonian-Arumanian contact."

He was active during the World War II Resistance Movement, after which he joined the guerrilla war against the Germans in 1944. He was imprisoned that same year, but has managed to escape just when the Red Army was about to liberate Kraków. In the period 1948–49 he was imprisoned for one year by the Communists, but was eventually released.

He received his M.A. at the University of Wrocław in 1947, and PhD at the Jagiellonian University in 1958. He served as a professor at the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin in the period 1952–1961, and also at the Slavic Institute of the Polish Academy of Learning. Afterward he emigrated to the United States where he taught Slavic languages at the University of Chicago from 1962 until the retirement in 1993 as Professor Emeritus.

He was elected as a member of the Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts in 1972.

His research includes a study of the Macedonian dialects of Suho and Visoka, his habilitation on Balkan conditionals, a monograph on the Arumanian dialect of Krushevo, and his last book: The Origins of the Slavs: A Linguist's View. He also co-edited a dictionary of linguistic terminology and was the author of more than 70 articles and reviews.