Valter Tauli. Sein Leben und Wirken in der Sprachwissenschaft und in der Sprachplanung
Valter Tauli. His Life and Linguistic and Language Planning Activities

Summary/Abstract: Valter Tauli is one of the internationally best known Estonian linguists, renowned, in the first place, for being one of the founding fathers of the sociolinguistic subdiscipline of language planning. He defended his doctor’s thesis ”Phonological Tendencies in Estonian” at Lund University, in 1956, and in 1962, was employed as senior lecturer (docent) in Estonian at Uppsala whence retiring in 1973. The main thread in V. Tauli’s scholarly activities is language planning, as manifested in, inter alia, his first monograph ”Õigekeelsuse ja keelekorralduse põhimõtted ja meetodid” (1938), and in ”Introduction to a Theory of Language Planning” (1968; in English and Estonian). In several articles he introduced the Estonian language reform of the early 20th century to the international scholarly public. Besides his devotion to language planning in general and Estonian language reform in particular, he took great interest in structural tendencies of languages, published the first frequency dictionary of Estonian (in 1964) and wrote a grammar of Standard Estonian (two volumes; in Estonian and English), descriptive in its angle of approach, but also containing several proposals for changing the norms of the standard language. V. Tauli published more than one hundred scholarly works in English, Estonian, German, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Finnish, and Hungarian.

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