Education
Charles University in Prague.
Charles University in Prague.
Skalička was born on 19 August 1909 in Prague, then part of Austria-Hungary. He became associated with the Prague School while studying at Charles University in Prague, at which he habilitated in 1935, writing on Finno-Ugric linguistics. He remained at the university, and in 1946 was appointed professor there, founding the department of linguistics and phonetics.
His work included translation and comparative studies of languages, and was reported to have a basic understanding of approximately 1200 languages and dialects.
He developed morphological typology into five categories, classifying languages into isolating, agglutinating, inflectional, introflectional, and polysynthetic.
A member of the influential Prague School of linguists and literary critics and a corresponding member of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, he is credited with further developing morphological typology.