SOURCE: Nedeljković, Olga. “New Perspectives on the Collaboration Between Maksimilijan Vrhovac and Jernej Kopitar.” Papers in Slavic Philology 2 (1982): 122-49.

In the following essay, Nedeljković probes the sources of Kopitar's work on the South Slavic languages and discusses the mutual influence of Kopitar and the Zagrebian bishop-scholar Maksimilijan Vrhovac.

Jernej Kopitar's ideas regarding the reform of the Serbian literary language were realized in the work of Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, thanks to the very close collaboration of these two men. The antecedents of that achievement, however, can be traced all the way back to the time of the Counter Reformation. They were gradually shaped, in the course of time, by numerous agents and workers in the cultural sphere of the nation's existence, by educators, patrons of learning, scholars and literary writers from Illyria. The eventual shaping of the Serbo-Croatian language is, then, the final result of the missionary activities...