Tadeusz Milewski


Tadeusz Milewski was a Polish linguist and professor at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, specializing in the study of the Slavic languages, general linguistics and linguistic typology.

Education and career

Tadeusz Milewski was born in Kolomyia and studied linguistics at the University of Lviv, under the supervision of Tadeusz Lehr-Spławiński, from 1925 to 1929. His doctoral research was on the Polabian language. Together with his professor, he moved to the Jagiellonian University in Kraków in 1929 and took up a teaching position there.
Like other professors of the Jagiellonian University, he was arrested by the Gestapo on 6 November 1939, and he spent a year in concentration camps in Sachsenhausen and Dachau. After his release, he participated in clandestine teaching in German-occupied Poland, and also started working on his book Outline of General Linguistics.
Milewski became a professor at the Jagiellonian University in 1946, and taught there in various roles until his death on 5 March 1966 in Kraków, after a long illness. The funeral was held by Archbishop Karol Wojtyła, a former student and longtime friend.

Scientific contributions

Milewski is internationally best known for his contributions to linguistic typology, in particular his distinction between concentric and excentric language types, which is widely recognized as a precursor to the well-known distinction between head-marking and dependent-marking languages. He is also the originator of Milewski's typology. In addition to his interests in Slavic and Indo-European linguistics, he had a strong interest in the languages of North America.

Selected works