“Every fox praises its own tail”. Jan Blahoslav (1523–1571) on Slavic dialects

Abstract

Summary Jan Blahoslav (1523–1571) was one of the first – if not the first – to devote a separate chapter to the phenomenon of vernacular diatopic variation in his Czech grammar. His pioneering attempts at making sense of this issue have thus far remained understudied, especially outside of the Czech Republic. In this contribution, we open up this important text, largely written in Czech, to a wider audience by means of an annotated English translation. In addition, we frame his interest in dialectal variation in the intellectual trends of 16th-century language study, especially within the Protestant circles in which Blahoslav was active.