Vatroslav Rožić


Vatroslav Rožić was a Croatian linguist and ethnographer.
He was born in Prodin Dol near Jastrebarsko. In Zagreb he attended classical gymnasium and studied Slavic languages, history and geography. He was a teacher in Zagreb and Zemun, and since 1905 a teacher in a gymnasium in Zagreb. He started out as a dialectologist with an extensive treatise Kajkavački dijalekat u Prigorju. He wrote a number of grammatical and didactic works, but is mainly known for purist "cleansing" of the Croatian literary language, often exaggerating in his zeal.
His main work is a 1904 book Barbarizmi u hrvatskom ili srpskom jeziku. Being a Croatian Vukovian, his ideal language was "a clean Štokavian literary language" without loanwords, Chakavisms, Kajkavisms, neologisms and archaisms.
Rožić also published Prigorje. Narodni život i običaji in Zbornik za narodni život i običaje Južnih Slavena - an ethnographic monograph about his homeland, written in the local dialect.