Victor Friedman

Victor A. Friedman (born October 18, 1949) is an American linguist, Slavist.

He is the Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Service Professor in Humanities at the University of Chicago.

He holds an appointment in the Department of Linguistics and an associate appointment in the Department of Anthropology.

He has published numerous articles in English, Macedonian, and Albanian.

Friedman was born in Chicago into a family of descendants of Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire and Romania.

He received his B.A. in Russian language and literature at Reed College in 1970.

Friedman's PhD was in Slavic languages and literatures and in general linguistics at the University of Chicago in 1975.

His dissertation, The Grammatical Categories of the Macedonian Indicative, was the first publication about modern Macedonian in the U.S. and won the Mark Perry Galler prize for best dissertation in the Humanities Division at Chicago.

From 1975 until 1993, Friedman taught at the University of North Carolina, where he served as department chairman.

In 1993, he was appointed to a professorship at the University of Chicago.

He has held visiting positions at Cornell University, the University of Skopje, the Central European University in Budapest, Kyoto University, the University of Helsinki, the University of Pristina, the National University of Malaysia and La Trobe University.

His expertise extends over all languages of the Balkans and the Caucasus, including Albanian, Aromanian, Azeri, Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Georgian, Greek, Judezmo, Lak, Macedonian, Romani, Romanian, Russian, Tadjik, and Turkish.

His research has been multidisciplinary and has involved extensive fieldwork in the Balkans.

In 1994 he served as a senior policy and political analyst to the United Nations regarding policy in the former Yugoslavia, and since then he has been involved in other consultative roles in the region.