Life story
Anton Bernolák was born on 3 October 1762 in Slanica in the Orava region. He studied theology and became a Catholic priest, but he entered history above all as a linguist — the first to attempt to give the Slovaks a standard literary language.
In 1787 he codified the first standard Slovak — the so-called Bernolák standard — based on the Western Slovak dialect. He published a grammar and rules of spelling for it, opening the way for Slovak to become a written language, not merely a spoken one.
The work of his life was the extensive five-volume Slovár Slovenskí Češko-Laťinsko-Ňemecko-Uherskí — a dictionary he laboured over for decades and which appeared only after his death. In it he gathered the wealth of the Slovak vocabulary and proved that Slovak is a fully fledged language.
He served as parish priest and dean in Nové Zámky, where he died on 15 January 1813. Although the Štúr standard of Slovak later prevailed, Bernolák remains the first to tell the Slovaks that their tongue deserved to be written down.
Biographical information from public sources. Portrait: Wikimedia Commons (Public domain).
Constellation of Life
Important milestones that shaped their journey.