Zigmas Zinkevičius

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.

Life and career

Zinkevičius was born on 4 January 1925 in the Juodausiai village in Ukmergė district. In 1939, after finishing the six-year school, he transferred to the Antanas Smetona Gymnasium in Ukmergė. In 1945, Zinkevičius entered the Faculty of History and Philology of Vilnius University (VU).

Academics

Zinkevičius's academic career began in 1946, when he held the position of chief laboratory assistant at the Lithuanian Department of Vilnius University until 1950. After finishing his studies in 1950, Zinkevičius taught in VU and the Vilnius Pedagogical Institute until 1956. In 1955, he defended his thesis Lietuvių kalbos įvardžiuotinių būdvardžių istorijos bruožai (lit. 'Historical Traits of Adjective Pronouns in the Lithuanian Language'). Between 1956 and 1967, he was the docent at the Department of Lithuanian Language of VU. Zinkevičius was also the deputy dean of the Faculty of History and Philology in 1956–1968 and between 1962 and 1964, held the position of chief researcher. Between 1964 and 1966, together with Aleksas Stanislovas Girdenis, Zinkevičius prepared a new classification of the dialects of the current Lithuanian language. In 1967, he defended his doctoral thesis Lietuvių dialektologija (Lyginamoji tarmių fonetika ir morfologija) ('Lithuanian Dialectology (Comparative Phonetics and Morphology of Dialects)'). From 1967 to 1973, Zinkevičius received the position of professor at the Department of the Lithuanian Language. He was the head of the Department of Lithuanian Language at the Faculty of Philology of Vilnius University from 1973 until 1988.

Then, between 1988 and 1991, Zinkevičius became the head of the Department of Baltic Philology. After Lithuania regained its independence, he also began lecturing at the Vytautas Magnus University. He was the director of the Lithuanian Language Institute in 1995 and 1996.

From 2001 to 2009, he was the Chairman of the Council of the Science and Encyclopaedia Publishing Institute. Zinkevičius was also the editor-in-chief of the Lithuania Minor Encyclopedia (3 vols. 2000–06). While in his nineties, he still worked as many as 10–12 hours a day. The professor was widely-acclaimed as the most famous, productive, and cited Lithuanian linguist of recent times. His works concerned subjects such as dialectology and the Lithuanian language's history, as well as the history of its study, its historical grammar, onomastics, and he reviewed many works of linguistics. Zinkevičius's work was well-received, both in Lithuania and abroad, where he was elected as a foreign member of many academies: the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities from 1982, Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters from 1991, Latvian Academy of Sciences from 1995.

Politics

According to Polish historian Barbara Jundo-Kaliszewska, during the 1980s and 1990s, Zinkevičius was one of the prominent activists of the nationalist and anti-Polish, organization Vilnija, whose main goal was a rapid Lithuanization of the Vilnius region.

Zinkevičius tenured as Minister of Education and Science from December 10, 1996, to March 25, 1998, in Vagnorius Cabinet II and was a state consultant on education and science issues in 1998. During his tenure as Minister of Education and Science, he helped intensify the policy of Lithuanianization of the Polish minority living in Lithuania. On December 17, 1996, in an interview he said that Lithuanian should be the sole language of lectures in state schools, and that youth in Vilnius Region speak a "simple" language, while in schools they are forced to speak in a language foreign to them, Polish. He also questioned the citizenship of those who do not speak Lithuanian. The statement prompted a protest from the Polish Foreign Ministry and the Congress of Poles of Lithuania. Prime Minister Gediminas Vagnorius declared that the minister's opinions did not reflect the government's position.

On February 3, 2015, he was one of 60 signatories of an open letter addressed, among others, to Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaitė and members of the government, in which he demanded that the Polish minority party LLRA be excluded from the government coalition and that the party's deputies be stripped of their seats in the Seimas, due to the stated reasons that LLRA's views are openly directed against the state and it repeatedly lies in international forums about discrimination against the Polish minority in Lithuania, without specifying which parts of Lithuanian or international law were broken by Lithuania. On August 28, 2015, he published an open letter addressed to the Minister of Education Juozas Bernatonis protesting a planned reform allowing Poles in Lithuania to spell their names in Polish, arguing that: "Undoubtedly, the supposedly Polish surnames of most Polish-speakers in Southeastern Lithuania are actually of Lithuanian origin. They were Polonized during the Polish and Soviet occupations".

After Zinkevičius's death, Lithuania's prime minister between 1996 and 1999 Gediminas Vagnorius said that Zinkevičius "brought a different approach, a sincere, matter-of-fact, professional approach to education policy and forced others to step up" and described him as "very sincere, very benevolent and distinguished by high intelligence". He was elected chairman of the Lithuanian Christian Democratic Party in 1999. He resigned from the leadership of the party on November 17, 2000, in protest against the merger of the Lithuanian Christian Democratic Party with the Christian Democratic Union (KDS) led by Kazys Bobelis. He became a member of the new Lithuania's Christian Democracy Party in 2001.