born April 16, 1890, Moscow, Russia
died June 25, 1938, Vienna, Austria
Russian linguist.
Born into a family of scholars, he held professorships in Russia and (from 1922) at the University of Vienna. One of the founders of the Prague school of linguistics, he was noted as the author of the school's most important work on phonology , Principles of Phonology (1939). Influenced by Ferdinand de Saussure , Trubetskoy redefined the phoneme functionally as the smallest distinctive unit within the structure of a language. He died of a heart attack after being persecuted by the Nazis for criticizing racist theory.