Sava Mrkalj

Sava Mrkalj
Born	1783 Kordun, Military Frontier, Austrian Empire (now Croatia)
Died	1833 Vienna, Austrian Empire
Nationality	Austrian
Occupation	Linguistics, philology, poetry
Known for	Serbian language reform

Sava Mrkalj (pronounced [sǎːʋa mr̩̂kaːʎ]) (1783–1833) was a Serb linguist, grammarian, philologist, and poet known for his attempt to reform the Serbian language before Vuk Karadžić.

Mrkalj was born in the hamlet of Sjeničak in Kordun, at the time Military Frontier, Austrian Empire, now present-day Croatia. He attended high school in Zagreb, and graduated from Pest University with the degree of Humanitatis et Philosophiæ Doctor.

It was in 1805 in Pest that he began to devote himself to philological researches, inspired by the works of German philologist Johann Christoph Adelung and others who were working on language reforms. Mrkalj spoke fluent German, French, Greek and Hebrew. He is best known for attempting to reform the Serbian language before Vuk Stefanović Karadžić. In a publication titled Сало дебелога јера либо азбукопротрес / Fat of the Thick Yer, i.e. Alphabet Reshuffling (Buda, 1810), he proposed a simplification of the Serbian alphabet from forty-two to twenty-six letters. His contemporaries were poets and writers Lukijan Mušicki, Ivan Jugović, Sima Milutinović Sarajlija, Jeremija Gagić, Stevan Živković (Telemak), Pavle Solarić, and philologists Luka Milovanov Georgijević (1784–1828), Jernej Kopitar, Piotr Dubrovsky, and Johann Christoph Adelung. Mrkalj gave his support to Vuk and Kopitar during the Serbian Language Controversy, but retracted everything he wrote when he was threatened with defrocking.

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