Mate Kapović (born 1981) graduated in linguistics and Croatian language and literature in 2003 at Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb. He has been working at the Department of linguistics at the same faculty since 2004. He obtained his PhD in 2007 at the University of Zadar with the dissertation Reconstruction of Balto-Slavic Personal Pronouns (with Emphasis on Accentuation). Kapović also studied Japanese, Chinese and Scandinavian languages and literatures. He currently teaches comparative/historical Indo-European phonology and morphology and general phonology. He has also taught Indo-European, Balto-Slavic, Slavic and Croatian comparative/historical accentology, sociolinguistics and Swahili. Kapović also does research in Croatian and Western South Slavic dialectology (including fieldwork) and writes about problems of language policy, prescriptivism, standardization and language and nationalism (especially in former Yugoslavia).
His professional stays abroad include Istanbul (Turkey), Vienna (Austria) and Osaka (Japan). He published more than 70 articles and the following books: Introduction to Indo-Europan Linguistics. A Survey of Languages and Comparative Phonology (2008) [in Croatian], Who Does Language Belong to? (2011) [in Croatian], History of Croatian Accentuation. Phonetics (2015) [in Croatian], (with Anđel Starčević and Daliborka Sarić) Language could not care less (2019) [in Croatian], Introduction to Phonology (2023) [in Croatian] and Usage Guide for the 21st Century (2024) [in Croatian]. He also edited the volumes Tones and Theories (2007) and The Indo-European Languages for Routledge (2017). He is the founder of the annual International Workshop on Balto-Slavic Accentology (IWoBA) (annually and then occasionally since 2005). He is a member of the Dialectology Committee and Etymology Committee of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts.