Valter Tauli elust ja keelelisest tegevusest
The Linguistic and Language Planning Activities of Valter Tauli

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 was born in Tallinn on 13 November 1907, graduated from the University of Tartu in 1931, earned his living as an upper secondary school teacher at Jakob Westholm Private Gymnasium in Tallinn until 1939, when he became a holder of a scholarship and got a post as assistent at Tartu University. In 1944 he fled to Sweden, where he first became an archive worker at Uppsala University, then holder of a scholarship and a research fellow, defended his doctoral thesis "Phonological Tendencies in Estonian" at Lund University in 1956, and finally, in 1962, was employed as senior lecturer (docent) in Estonian at Uppsala University whence he retired in 1973. He died in Uppsala on 3 January 1986. The main thread in Tauli's scholarly activities is language planning, as manifested in, inter alia, his first monograph "Principles and Methods of Correct Usage and Language Planning" (Tartu, 1938), written in Estonian with a summary in French, and in "Introduction to a Theory of Language Planning" (Uppsala, 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. Tauli published more than one hundred scholarly works in English, Estonian, German, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Finnish, and Hungarian. Last but not least, Tauli was a leading figure in the field of cultural activities of Estonians in exile.

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