Career
Pranjković is a Bosnian Croat, born in Kotor Varoš in Bosnia and Herzegovina. After the classical secondary school in Visoko, he received a Bachelor degree in the Croatian language from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Zagreb. Today, he is a professor of standard Croatian language.
As a learned linguist and philologist with a wide spectrum of interests, Pranjković made important contributions to several linguistic areas.
His syntactic studies Croatian Syntax, Second Croatian Syntax and Croatian grammar (published in co-authorship with Josip Silić) are generally considered important works for the modern Croatian syntax. Other areas of his work are general linguistics, history of Croatian philology in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and the linguistic heritage of Bosnian Franciscans.
This last topic was the subject of several studies of Pranjković, as well as the book Croatian Language and the Bosnian Franciscans, where he described the linguistic area which was crucial for the development and standardization of the Croatian language, but which was greatly neglected until his work. His articles have been collected in several books
Pranjković has polemicized with virtually every Croatian linguist of the older generation.
He has criticized their prescriptive approaches to language. However, French linguist Paul-Louis Thomas and Croatian linguist Snježana Kordić have described and criticized puristic and prescriptive tendencies even in Pranjković’s publications. As a versatile linguist, Pranjković made important contributions to stylistics.