Linguists

August Schleicher

SHLY-kher (German: [ˈʃlaɪçɐ])

Citation Formats

General Reference

Language Atlas. "August Schleicher." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://language.interactiveatlas.org/linguists/august-schleicher.

APA Style

Language Atlas. (n.d.). August Schleicher. Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://language.interactiveatlas.org/linguists/august-schleicher

BibTeX

@misc{languageatlas-august-schleicher,
  author = {Language Atlas},
  title = {August Schleicher},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://language.interactiveatlas.org/linguists/august-schleicher},
  note = {Accessed August 30, 2026}
}

German linguist who pioneered the family-tree (Stammbaum) model for visualizing relationships among languages and produced an early systematic reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European. He described language as an organism with periods of development, maturity and decline, and composed Schleicher's Fable, a short narrative in reconstructed Proto-Indo-European, to demonstrate the method.

Facts

Birth Year

1821 1

Death Year

1868 1

Role

Linguist; originator of the family-tree model and early reconstructor of Proto-Indo-European 1

Birth Date

1821-02-19 1

Death Date

1868-12-06 1

Cross-Tradition Connections

Associated With

Indo-European

Schleicher produced an early systematic reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European and modeled its descendant languages as a family tree.

Source Wikipedia: August Schleicher

Influenced By

Franz Bopp

Bopp's comparative method for reconstructing grammatical forms across Indo-European languages underlies Schleicher's later family-tree model and reconstructions.

Source Wikipedia: Franz Bopp

Sources

1. Wikipedia: August Schleicher

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