He was born in Radzymin, in the Warsaw Governorate of Congress Poland (a state in personal union with the Russian Empire), to a family of distant French extraction. One of his ancestors had been a French aristocrat who immigrated to Poland during the reign of Polish King
Augustus II the Strong. In 1862 Baudouin de Courtenay entered the "
Main School," a predecessor of the
University of Warsaw. In 1866 he graduated from its historical and philological faculty and won a scholarship of the Russian Imperial Ministry of Education. After leaving Poland, he studied at various foreign universities, including those of
Prague,
Jena and
Berlin. In 1870 he received a
doctorate from the
University of Leipzig for his work on analogy and a master's degree from St. Petersburg for his
Polish-language dissertation
On the Old Polish Language Prior to the 14th Century. Baudouin de Courtenay established the
Kazan School of linguistics in the mid-1870s and served as professor at the local university from 1875. Later he was chosen as the head of linguistics faculty at the University of Dorpat (1883–1893). In 1882 he married historian and journalist
Romualda Bagnicka. Between 1894 and 1898 he occupied the same post at the
Jagiellonian University in
Kraków only to be appointed to
St. Petersburg, where he continued to refine his theory of phonetic alternations. After
Poland regained independence in 1918, he returned to
Warsaw, where he formed the core of the linguistics faculty of the University of Warsaw. From 1887 he held a permanent seat in the
Polish Academy of Skills and from 1897 he was a member of the
Petersburg Academy of Sciences. Baudouin de Courtenay was the editor of the 3rd (1903–1909) and 4th (1912–1914) editions of the
Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language compiled by Russian
lexicographer Vladimir Dahl (1801–1872). Apart from his scientific work, Baudouin de Courtenay was also a strong supporter of the national revival of various national minority and ethnic groups. In 1915 he was arrested by the
Okhrana, the Russian
secret service, for publishing a brochure on the autonomy of peoples under Russian rule. He spent three months in prison, but was released. In 1922, without his knowledge, he was proposed by the national minorities of Poland as a presidential candidate, but was defeated in the third round of voting in the Polish parliament and eventually
Gabriel Narutowicz was chosen. He was also an active
Esperantist and president of the
Polish Esperanto Association. In 1925, he was one of the co-founders of the
Polish Linguistic Society. In 1927, he formally withdrew from the
Catholic Church without joining any other religious denomination. He died in
Warsaw. He is buried at the
Protestant Reformed Cemetery in Warsaw with the epitaph "He sought truth and justice". == Contribution to linguistics==