MARTIN HATTALA

Martin Hattala was born in Trstená in 1821 and he died in 1903 in Prague.

EDUCATION He received the basic education in our school in Trstená and at these days our school has his name. Then he went to study in Trnava, Vienna and he became a Catholic priest. But he was always interested in the query of our Slovak language. So he moved to Prague to study Linguistics. Then he became an university teacher there.

SITUATION IN SLOVAKIA Slovakia didn´t have its own language in the 19th century. Our ancestors spoke only Slavonic language and they used dialects. But officially they had to speak Hungarian and German. There were many people trying to enact Slovak language, and this happened in 1843 by a revolutionary Ľudovít Štúr. People started to use it in common conversations, and also in newspapers, but few years later it was prohibited. Ľudovít Štúr

HATTALA´S WORK And at that time when Slovak language was in danger of disappearing, Martin Hattala united Slovak intellectuals and they edited the Štúr´s form of language in 1951.