Vilém Mathesius was a Czech

Czech people

Czechs, or Czech people are a western Slavic people of Central Europe, living predominantly in the Czech Republic. Small populations of Czechs also live in Slovakia, Austria, the United States, the United Kingdom, Chile, Argentina, Canada, Germany, Russia and other countries...

 linguist and literary historian, a scholar of English

English literature

English literature is the literature written in the English language, including literature composed in English by writers not necessarily from England; for example, Robert Burns was Scottish, James Joyce was Irish, Joseph Conrad was Polish, Dylan Thomas was Welsh, Edgar Allan Poe was American, J....

 and Czech literature

Czech literature

Czech literature is the literature written by Czechs or other inhabitants of the Czech state, mostly in the Czech language, although other languages like Old Church Slavonic, Latin or German have been also used, especially in the past. Modern authors from the Czech territory who wrote in other...

. His cousin was Bohumil Mathesius

Bohumil Mathesius

Bohumil Mathesius was a Czech poet, translator, publicist and literary scientist – expert on Russian literature. He was a professor on the Faculty of Philosophy at the Charles University in Prague...

.

In 1912 he became the first professor of English language and literature at the Charles University

Charles University in Prague

Charles University in Prague is the oldest and largest university in the Czech Republic. Founded in 1348, it was the first university in Central Europe and is also considered the earliest German university...

. In 1926 he co-founded the Prague Linguistic Circle

Prague linguistic circle

The Prague school or the Prague linguistic circle was an influential group of literary critics and linguists in Prague. Its proponents developed methods of structuralist literary analysis during the years 1928–1939. It has had significant continuing influence on linguistics and semiotics...

 (Pražský lingvistický kroužek). He engaged in grammar

Grammar

In linguistics, grammar is the set of structural rules that govern the composition of clauses, phrases, and words in any given natural language. The term refers also to the study of such rules, and this field includes morphology, syntax, and phonology, often complemented by phonetics, semantics,...

, phonology

Phonology

Phonology is, broadly speaking, the subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with the sounds of language. That is, it is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use...

 and stylistics

Stylistics (linguistics)

Stylistics is the study and interpretation of texts from a linguistic perspective. As a discipline it links literary criticism and linguistics, but has no autonomous domain of its own...

 of English and Czech languages. He was further interested in general linguistics

Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....

, language culture and general cultural issues. His works about word order

Word order

In linguistics, word order typology refers to the study of the order of the syntactic constituents of a language, and how different languages can employ different orders. Correlations between orders found in different syntactic subdomains are also of interest...

 and syntax

Syntax

In linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing phrases and sentences in natural languages....

can be labeled as pioneer projects.

Main works

• Dějiny literatury anglické I–II (The History of English Literature I–II)
• Čeština a obecný jazykozpyt (Czech Language and General Linguistics)
• Obsahový rozbor současné angličtiny (Content Analysis of Contemporary English)
• výbor Jazyk, kultura a slovesnost (anthology Language, Culture and Poetic Art)
• Nebojte se angličtiny

Vilém Mathesius is also an author of essays on cultural-political issues.

He is memorialized by the Vilém Mathesius Centre for Research and Education in Semiotics and Linguistics at the Charles University.