Rasmus Rask

Danish linguist

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Lived 1787–1832, aged 45

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44 languages
Cross-language footprint
Era
1787–1832
Aged 45

Summary

Updated 2026-05-29

Danish linguist who cracked the code on how Germanic languages systematically differ from their Indo-European cousins in 1818—a pattern that became foundational to comparative linguistics, though Jacob Grimm got credit for formalizing it.

Biography

About

Rasmus Kristian Rask was a Danish linguist, philologist and a principal founder of the science of comparative linguistics. In 1818, he first showed that, in their consonant sounds, words in the Germanic languages vary with a certain regularity from their equivalents in the other Indo-European languages. What Rask observed proved to be the basis of a fundamental law of comparative linguistics, which was formally set forward in 1822 by Jacob Grimm.

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