Marko Snoj

In appearances on radio and television he has popularized etymology in Slovene. Especially noteworthy is his series of twenty-two one-hour programs on the national television station, TV Slovenija, Besede (Words), which has been rebroadcast several times since its first showing during the February–June 1998 season.

Together with academy member Rexhep Ismajli he prepared an annotated translation into Albanian of studies on Albanian by the renowned Slovene Slavic specialist Franz Miklosich entitled Gjurmime shqiptare/Albanische Forschungen (Albanian Studies; Prishtina 2007).

In 1997 he published a popular etymological desk reference of Slovene, Slovenski etimološki slovar, which was later revised and expanded in 2003. An on-line version of the Slovene Etymological Dictionary is in the Fran Slovene lexicographic portal of the Institute for Slovene Language.

In 1994, he established the journal Slovenski jezik / Slovene Linguistic Studies with the American Slavic specialist sl:Marc L. Greenberg.

During the years 1991–92 under the auspices of a Humboldt Fellowship Snoj studied with the Indo-Europeanist Gert Klingenschmitt at the University of Regensburg, Germany, where he concentrated on problems of Balto-Slavic accentology. His articles on Slavic accentology take into account contemporary work on Indo-European laryngeal theory and the nature of Indo-European paradigms with regard to ablaut and the morphological distribution of word-level prosodic features.

Following his military service in 1985–86 (which he used for learning Albanian from his fellow conscripts) he worked on his doctoral dissertation on Proto-Slavic z from Indo-European s in Light of the Most Recent Accentological Discoveries, which he defended in 1989. His advisor was the Indo-Europeanist and academy member Bojan Čop; his doctoral committee also included the etymologist and academy member France Bezlaj and Indo-Aryanist Varja Cvetko Orešnik.

Marko Snoj was born in Ljubljana. He attended Šentvid High School and studied comparative linguistics at the Department of Comparative Linguistics and Oriental Studies at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Ljubljana, completing his bachelor's degree in 1982 with a specialization in comparative linguistics and Hittitology. His 1984 master's thesis treated the problem of i- and u-coloration in the reflexes of Indo-European syllabic sonorants in Balto-Slavic.

In 1981, he was invited by France Bezlaj to work on the project Etimološki slovar slovenskega jezika (Slovenian Etymological Dictionary). He contributed a considerable number of the entries, especially in the third (1995) and fourth volumes (2005), as well as most of the work for the final, fifth volume Kazala (Indices) (2007).

In the late 1980s he continued his training in Albanian by attending summer courses at the University of Pristina. Later he published Kratka albanska slovnica (A Short Grammar of Albanian) (Ljubljana 1991), Rückläufiges Wörterbuch der albanischen Sprache (Reverse Dictionary of Albanian) (Hamburg 1994), and an article on the history of Albanian studies research in Slovenia in the volume Studime II (Prishtina 1996).

Marko Snoj (born 19 April 1959) is an Indo-Europeanist, Slavist, Albanologist, lexicographer, and etymologist employed at the Fran Ramovš Institute for Slovene Language of the Scientific Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Ljubljana, Slovenia. He served as director of the institute from 2008 to 2018. He has made numerous scholarly contributions to Indo-European linguistics, particularly in the realms of Slovene and Albanian, and is noted for his work in advancing Slavic etymology in both scholarly and popular domains. He is an associate member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts.