Zigmas Zinkevičius

Biography

Zigmas Zinkevičius (4 January 1925 – 20 February 2018) was a Lithuanian academician, Baltist, linguist, linguistic historian, dialectologist, politician, and the former Minister of Education and Science of Lithuania (1996–1998). Zinkevičius authored over a hundred books, including the popular six-volume "History of the Lithuanian Language" (1984–1994), and over a thousand articles, both in Lithuanian and other languages. He was an academician of the Lithuanian Catholic Academy of Science since 1991 and a full member of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences from 1990 to 2011, when he became an emeritus member.

Zinkevičius was a member of the editorial boards of the Lithuanian Language Society (Lietuvių kalbos draugija) and of the international periodicals "Baltistica" and "Lituanistica". Zinkevičius created the theory about the three Lithuanian written languages at the beginning of Lithuanian writing. During his 72-year academic career, he taught at Vilnius University for 45 years. Zinkevičius was fluent in a number of languages, including English, German, Russian, Polish, Ukrainian, Belarusian and French.