Pavle Ivić

Who was Pavle Ivić?

Pavle Ivić was a Serbian South Slavic dialectologist and phonologist. Both his field work and his synthesizing studies were extensive and authoritative. A few of his best-known publications are:

Die serbokroatischen Dialekte, ihre Struktur und Entwicklung, Gravenhage, Mouton, 1958

Srpski narod i njegov jezik. Belgrade, 1971;

Word and sentence prosody in Serbocroatian, by Ilse Lehiste and Pavle Ivić. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986.

He edited many periodicals and scholarly series, and was an important figure in the All-Slavic Linguistic Atlas project. He was one of the most respected authorities on the standardization of the Serbian language. He frequently lectured in the U.S. and other countries, and was an Honorary Member of the Linguistic Society of America.

A well-known intellectual and public figure in Yugoslavia and member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, he took part in the polemics accompanying the breakdown of 1945-1991 Yugoslavia. He was as signatory of the 1986 Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts.

He was married to Prof. Milka Ivić, a Slavic syntactician, and is survived by his son Aleksandar Ivić, a mathematician.