1 republic of uzbekistan ministry of higher and secondary specialised education

Jan Niecisław Ignacy Baudouin de 
Courtenay
(13 March 1845 – 3 November 1929) 
was a Polish linguist and Slavist, best known for 
his theory of the phoneme and phonetic 
alternations. 
For most of his life Baudouin de Courtenay 
worked at Imperial Russian universities: Kazan 
(1874–1883), Dorpat (now Tartu, Estonia) 
(1883–1893), Kraków (1893–1899) in Austria-
Hungary, and St. Petersburg (1900–1918). In 
1919–1929 he was a professor at the re-
established University of Warsaw in a once again 
independent Poland. 
He was born in Radzymin, in the Warsaw Governorate of 
Congress Poland (a state in personal union with the Russian Empire), 
to a family of distant French extraction. One of his ancestors had been 
a French aristocrat who immigrated to Poland during the reign of Polish 
King Augustus II the Strong. In 1862 Baudouin de Courtenay entered 
the "Main School," a predecessor of the University of Warsaw. In 1866 
he graduated from its historical and philological faculty and won a 
scholarship of the Russian Imperial Ministry of Education. After 
leaving Poland, he studied at various foreign universities, including 
those of Prague, Jena and Berlin. In 1870 he received a doctorate from 
the University of Leipzig for his work on analogy and a master's degree 
from St. Petersburg for his Polish-language dissertation On the Old 
Polish Language Prior to the 14th Century. 
Baudouin de Courtenay established the Kazan School of 
linguistics in the mid-1870s and served as professor at the local 
university from 1875. Later he was chosen as the head of linguistics 
faculty at the University of Dorpat (now Tartu, Estonia) (1883–1893). 
Between 1894 and 1898 he occupied the same post at the Jagiellonian 
University in Kraków only to be appointed to St. Petersburg, where he 
continued to refine his theory of phonetic alternations. After Poland 
regained independence in 1918, he returned to Warsaw, where he 
formed the core of the linguistics faculty of the University of Warsaw. 
From 1887 he held a permanent seat in the Polish Academy of Skills 
and from 1897 he was a member of the Petersburg Academy of 
Sciences. 

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Three major schools of 20th-century phonology arose directly 
from his distinction between physiophonetic (phonological) and 
psychophonetic (morphophonological) alternations: the Leningrad 
school of phonology, the Moscow school of phonology, and the Prague 
school of phonology. All three schools developed different positions on 
the nature of Baudouin's alternational dichotomy. The Prague School 
was best known outside the field of Slavic linguistics. Throughout his 
life he published hundreds of scientific works in Polish, Russian, Czech, 
Slovenian, Italian, French and German.