16 Facts About Vladimir Dal

Vladimir Ivanovich Dal was a Russian lexicographer, speaker of many languages, Turkologist, and founding member of the Russian Geographical Society.

Vladimir Dal's father was a Danish physician named Johan Christian von Dahl, a linguist versed in the German, English, French, Russian, Yiddish, Latin, Greek and Hebrew languages.

Vladimir Dal served in the Imperial Russian Navy from 1814 to 1826, graduating from the Saint Petersburg Naval Cadet School in 1819.

Vladimir Dal then served in administrative positions in Saint Petersburg and in Nizhny Novgorod before his retirement in 1859.

Vladimir Dal had an interest in language and folklore from his early years.

Vladimir Dal started traveling by foot through the countryside, collecting sayings and fairy tales in various Slavic languages from the region.

Vladimir Dal published his first collection of fairy-tales in 1832.

In 1838 Vladimir Dal was elected to the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences.

Vladimir Dal continued his lexicographic studies and extensive travels throughout the 1850s and 1860s.

Vladimir Dal was interested in the wealth of the Russian language, and he began collecting words while still a student in the Naval Cadet School.

Vladimir Dal was a strong proponent of the native rather than adopted vocabulary.

Vladimir Dal's dictionary began to have a strong influence on literature at the beginning of the 20th century; in his 1911 article "Poety russkogo sklada", Maximilian Voloshin wrote:.

Just about the first of the contemporary poets who began to read Vladimir Dal was Vyacheslav Ivanov.

The encompassing nature of Vladimir Dal's dictionary gives it critical linguistic importance even today, especially because a large proportion of the dialectal vocabulary he collected has since passed out of use.

Vladimir Dal is interred at the Vagankovo Cemetery in Moscow.

Vladimir Dal's responsibilities included overseeing investigations of murders of children in the western part of Russia.