Trubetskoy, Nikolay Sergeyevich

Nikolay Sergeyevich Trubetskoy, also spelled Nikolaj Sergejevič Trubetzkoy, (born April 16, 1890, Moscow—died June 25, 1938, Vienna), Slavic linguist at the centre of the Prague school of linguistics, noted as the author of its most important work on phonology, Grundzüge der Phonologie (1939; “Principles of Phonology”). Influenced by Ferdinand de Saussure and in turn influencing Roman Jakobson, Trubetskoy redefined the phoneme functionally as the smallest distinctive unit within the structure of a given language, and he further broke these phonemes into their distinctive features.

Trubetskoy’s father, a Russian prince, was a professor of philosophy and rector of Moscow University. In 1913, after obtaining his degree from Moscow University, Trubetskoy enrolled at the University of Leipzig. He taught at Moscow University (1915–18) and at the universities of Rostov (1918–20) and Sofia (1920–22). In 1922 he was appointed professor of Slavic Philology at the University of Vienna. The Nazi occupation of Vienna contributed to Trubetskoy’s death: he suffered a severe heart attack after being persecuted for having published an article critical of racist theory.