Alma Karlin

Who was Alma Karlin?

Alma Vilibalda Maximiliana Karlin was a Slovene-Austrian traveler, writer, poet, collector, polyglot and theosophist.

She was born in the Styrian town of Celje in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire as the daughter of Jakob Karlin, a major in the Austro-Hungarian Army, and Vilibalda Miheljak, a teacher. Her father died when she was eight years old. Alma grew in a predominately German-speaking milieu, and regarded herself chiefly as Austrian rather than ethnic German or Slovene.

After completing her secondary education in Graz, she traveled to London, where she studied languages. She learned English, French, Latin, Italian, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish, Russian, and Spanish. In the later years, she also studied Persian, Chinese, and Japanese. She also spent six months in Paris, where she attended various languages courses at the Sorbonne.

It was at this time when she started work on her dictionary of ten languages, including Slovene.

At the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Karlin had to move to Sweden and Norway, since she was considered a persona non grata in the United Kingdom for being an Austrian-Hungarian citizen.