Olaf Broch

Olaf Broch (4 August 1867, Horten28 January 1961, Oslo) was a Norwegian Slavist and phonetician. He established Slavic studies in Norway and made significant contributions to Slavic dialectology and phonetics.

Life and work Broch was born in Horten, and was a brother of children's writer Lagertha Broch, zoologist Hjalmar Broch, and social worker Nanna Broch. He married Ninni Henriette Trampe in 1896. It was in Jagić's journal Archiv für slavische Philologie where he published his first article in 1895, a study of the Ubľa dialect. In the following years Broch made many extensive dialectological trips in Slavic countries, resulting in studies of Russian, Slovak, Belarusian, and Serbian Torlak dialects. In his studies of Russian dialects, Broch was the first to notice and describe dialects with two additional vowels /ѣ/ and /ω/, stimulating further research into the matter, including the influential 1914 study of the village dialect by Broch's close colleague Aleksey Shakhmatov.

Having experience with analysing phonetics of various Slavic dialects, Broch was invited by Jagić to write a volume on the general phonetics of Slavic languages for his Encyclopedia of Slavic Philology. Published in Russian (1910) and German (1911), it is regarded as Broch's most important scholarly contribution.

Broch was the first professor of Slavic languages at the University of Oslo, where he taught from 1900 to 1937. He was decorated Commander of the Order of St. Olav in 1946. He was a member of a number of foreign academies,

Publications The following bibliography entails works published as independent books. A more complete bibliography of Broch's works was published in:

Books Studien von der slovakisch-kleinrussischen Sprachgrenze im östlichen Ungarn [Studies of the Slovak-Ukrainian Language Border in East Hungary], 1897 Weitere Studien von der slovakisch-kleinrussischen Sprachgrenze im östlichen Ungarn [Further Studies of the Slovak-Ukrainian Language Border in East Hungary], 1899 Угрорусское нарѣчіе села Убли (Земплинскаго комитата) [Ugro-Russian Dialect of the Village Ubľa (Zemplín County)], 1899 Die Dialekte des südlichsten Serbiens [The Dialects of Southernmost Serbia], 1903 Описаніе одного говора изъ юго-западной части Тотемскаго уѣзда [A Description of a Dialect of the South-Western Part of Totemsky Uyezd], 1907 Очеркъ физіологіи славянскиой рѣчи [A Study of the Physiology of Slavic Speech], 1910 German translation: Slavische Phonetik [Slavic Phonetics], 1911 Говоры къ западу отъ Мосальска [Dialects West of Mosalsk], 1916 with Ernst W. Selmer: Håndbok i elementær fonetikk [Manual of Elementary Phonetics], ¹1921, ⁵1950 Proletariatets diktatur: Set og tænkt fra forsommeren 1923. [The Dictatorship of the Proleteriat: Experiences and Thoughts from Spring 1923], ¹1923, ²1924 (shortened edition) translations: Swedish (1924), French (1925), Russian (2018) Russisk grammatikk [Russian Grammar], ¹1936, ³1946 with Boris Kleiber: Lærebok i russisk [A Textbook of Russian], 1945

Translations Leo Tolstoj: Anna Karenin, 1911 F. M. Dostojevski: Brødrene Karamasov, 1915 Nestor Kotljarevskij: Det nittende århundre, 1946