Jože Toporišič (11 October 1926, Mostec pri Brežicah – 9 December 2014, Ljubljana) was the most prominent Slovene linguist of the second half of the twentieth century. He was active as a university professor, grammarian, orthographer, editor and researcher.
He began his education at the local primary school in Dobova, but his secondary schooling at the classical gymnasium in Maribor was interrupted by the Second World War and his family’s forced resettlement
to Silesia. After sitting the matura (school-leaving examination) in 1947, he enrolled at the University of Ljubljana’s Faculty of Arts to study Slovene and Russian, graduating in 1952. He first worked as a trainee teacher in Novo Mesto, then as a Slovene lector at the Faculty
of Arts in Zagreb. He received his doctorate in 1963 with a thesis on Finžgar’s prose and in 1976 became a full professor and head of the chair of Standard Slovene and Stylistics at the University of Ljubljana.
Toporišič’s field of research was extremely broad, covering virtually every level of standard Slovene: phonetics, morphology, lexicology, syntax and stylistics. His structural grammar Slovenska slovnica (1976) is considered the most influential contribution to Slovene linguistics in the second half of the twentieth century. A tireless spiritus agens, he also led the preparation of the 2001 edition of Slovenski pravopis, the normative guide to Slovene, and collaborated on the grammatical basis for the dictionary of standard Slovene. He received the Silver Order of Freedom of the Republic of Slovenia and the Zois Award for lifetime achievement. He was made a full member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts in 1997.
Helena Dobrovoljc
Fran Ramovš Institute of the Slovene Language
