Zigmas Zinkevičius

Zinkevičius' academic career began in 1946,[1] when he held the position of chief laboratory assistant at the Lithuanian Department of Vilnius University (VU) until 1950.[4] After finishing his studies in 1950,[5] Zinkevičius taught in VU and Vilnius Pedagogical Institute until 1956.[4] In 1955, he defended his thesis Lietuvių kalbos įvardžiuotinių būdvardžių istorijos bruožai (lit. Historical traits of adjective pronouns in Lithuanian language).[9] Between 1956 and 1967, he was the docent at the Department of Lithuanian Language of VU.[4] Zinkevičius was also the deputy dean of the Faculty of History and Philology in 1956–1968[8] and between 1962 and 1964, held the position of chief researcher.[4] In 1964–66, together with Aleksas Stanislovas Girdenis, Zinkevičius prepared a new classification of the dialects of the current Lithuanian language.[5] In 1967, he defended his doctoral thesis Lietuvių dialektologija (Lyginamoji tarmių fonetika ir morfologija) ("Lithuanian dialectology (Comparative phonetics and morphology of dialects)").[9] In 1967–1973, Zinkevičius received the position of professor at the Department of the Lithuanian Language.[4] He was the head of the Department of Lithuanian Language at the Faculty of Philology of Vilnius University from 1973–1988.[1][4]

Then, in 1988–1991, Zinkevičius became the head of the Department of Baltic Philology.[1][5] After Lithuania regained its independence, he also began lecturing at the Vytautas Magnus University.[1] He was the director of the Lithuanian Language Institute in 1995–1996.[1][5]

From 2001 to 2009, he was the Chairman of the Council of the Science and Encyclopaedia Publishing Institute.[5] Zinkevičius was also the editor-in-chief of the Lithuania Minor Encyclopedia (3 vols. 2000–06).[5] While in his nineties, he still worked as many as 10–12 hours a day.[10] The professor was widely acclaimed as the most famous, productive and cited Lithuanian linguist of recent times.[11][10][3] His works concerned subjects such as dialectology, the Lithuanian language's history as well as the history of its study, its historical grammar, onomastics, and he reviewed many works of linguistics.[1][8] Zinkevičius' work was well received, both in Lithuania and abroad, where he was elected as a foreign member of many academies: the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities from 1982, Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters from 1991, Latvian Academy of Sciences from 1995.[4][5]

Zinkevičius is also the author of the "wicz" theory, according to which Lithuanian Poles whose surnames end in "wicz" constitutes a separate ethnic group, but are really ethnic Lithuanians.[12][13]

According to Polish historian Barbara Jundo-Kaliszewska, during the 1980s and 1990s, Zinkevičius was one of the prominent activists of the nationalist, described as anti-Polish,[14] organization Vilnija,[15] whose main goal was a rapid Lithuanization of the Vilnius region.[16][17]

Zinkevičius tenured as Minister of Education and Science from December 10, 1996, to March 25, 1998, in Vagnorius Cabinet II and was a state consultant on education and science issues in 1998.[1][18] During his tenure as Minister of Education and Science, he helped intensify the policy of Lithuanianization of the Polish minority living in Lithuania.[12] On December 17, 1996, in an interview he said that Lithuanian should be the sole language of lectures in state schools, and that youth in Vilnius Region speak a "simple" language, while in schools they are forced to speak in a language foreign to them, Polish. He also questioned the citizenship of those who do not speak Lithuanian.[19] The statement prompted a protest from the Polish Foreign Ministry and the Congress of Poles of Lithuania.[19] Prime Minister Gediminas Vagnorius declared that the minister's opinions did not reflect the government's position.[19]

On February 3, 2015, he was one of 60 signatories of an open letter addressed, among others, to Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaitė and members of the government, in which he demanded that the Polish minority party LLRA be excluded from the government coalition and that the party's deputies be stripped of their seats in the Seimas, due to the stated reasons that LLRA's views are openly directed against the state and it repeatedly lies in international forums about discrimination against the Polish minority in Lithuania, without specifying which parts of Lithuanian or international law were broken by Lithuania.[20] On August 28, 2015, he published an open letter addressed to the Minister of Education Juozas Bernatonis protesting a planned reform allowing Poles in Lithuania to spell their names in Polish, arguing that "Undoubtedly, the supposedly Polish surnames of most Polish-speakers in Southeastern Lithuania are actually of Lithuanian origin. They were Polonized during the Polish and Soviet occupations".[21]

After Zinkevičius' death, Lithuania's prime minister in 1996–1999 Gediminas Vagnorius said that Zinkevičius "brought a different approach, a sincere, matter-of-fact, professional approach to education policy and forced others to step up" and described him as "very sincere, very benevolent and distinguished by high intelligence".[22] He was elected chairman of the Lithuanian Christian Democratic Party in 1999.[7] He resigned from the leadership of the party on November 17, 2000, in protest against the merger of the Lithuanian Christian Democratic Party with the Christian Democratic Union (KDS) led by Kazys Bobelis.[23] He became a member of the new Lithuania's Christian Democracy Party in 2001.[24]

Zigmas Zinkevičius was always a practising Roman Catholic.[9] His wife was Regina Zinkevičienė and they had two children, Laima Zinkevičiūtė and Vytautas Zinkevičius.[1][25] He died in hospital on 20 February 2018, surrounded by his family.[1] He was buried in the Antakalnis cemetery on February 23.[6][26] The contemporary president Dalia Grybauskaitė, when expressing her condolences on his death, said that Lithuania lost an outstanding linguist:

"The fundamental scientific works of the long-time Vilnius University professor made it possible to learn about the past of our language and nation, to understand its origin, to strengthen Lithuanianness and national self-esteem".[22]

The contemporary Minister of Education and Science Jurgita Petrauskienė said:

"Lithuania and the entire educational community lost an authoritative linguist, dialectologist, researcher of Baltistics, a great person. A bright memory of his personality also remains: a prominent scientist and at the same time a modest, benevolent, very hardworking and respectful person".[4]

In 1994, Zinkevičius, as the professor of VMU, was awarded the regalia of an Honorary Doctor.[1] For his services to Lithuania in 1995, Zinkevičius was awarded the Order of the Lithuanian Grand Duke Gediminas, 3rd Class.[5][1] He was also the laureate of the international Herder Prize in 1994 and the Lithuanian Science Advancement Award in 1995.[1] In addition, he was awarded the title of Honorary Doctorate of the University of Latvia.[1] In 2015, on July 6, the Lithuanian Statehood Day, Zinkevičius was awarded the Commander's Grand Cross of the Order for Merits to Lithuania by president Grybauskaitė.[31][5]

American historian Theodore R. Weeks regards Zigmas Zinkevičius as a "flagship example" of a trend in Lithuanian historiography and linguistics that depicts the Vilnius region as "always Lithuanian". According to Weeks, Zinkevičius in his book Eastern Lithuania in the Past and Now (published in 1993) "wishes to argue for the eternal Lithuanian nature of the region, a viewpoint that no historical or linguistic methods seem likely to support."[32] He also defines Zinkevičius' approach as "historical-linguistic ethnocentrism".[33] He emphasizes that Zinkevičius tends to ignore the actual ethnographic data and national self-identification of the inhabitants, in favour of promoting the thesis of the unchanging Lithuanian nature of the region.[33]

Polish researcher Robert Boroch is of a similar opinion, in his review of Zinkevičius' work The History of the Lithuanian Language (published in 1996) Boroch emphasized that "the weakness of the work is the lack of objectivity, mixing ideology and scientific facts".[34] He describes Zinkevičius' thesis about the lack of connection between the Polish language used in Lithuania and the one used in Poland as "wrong, because differences in pronunciation cannot be a distinctive feature sufficient to distinguish a given language", and his position as "justified only from the propaganda point of view", which Boroch believes aims to put the Polish language in Lithuania in the position of "a secondary and dying language".[34]