Schleicher, AUGUST, philologist, was born at Meiningen, on 19th February 1821, studied at Leipzig, Tübingen, and Bonn, and began to lecture on comparative philology at the last-named university in 1846. Four years later he was called to the chair of Slavonic Languages at Prague.
From 1857 to 1868 he lived at Jena as an honorary professor; and there he died on 6th December 1868. With him the comparative study of the Indo-Germanic languages took a decided step forward. In his Kompendium der vergleichenden Grammatik der Indogermanischen Sprachen (1861; 4th ed. 1876; Eng. trans. 1874-77) he showed clearly the relations of the members of the group, not only one to another, but of each to the original parent language, which he made a gallant attempt to reconstruct, and laid down the phonetic laws that had governed their respective developments. Schleicher did first-rate service also in advancing the scientific study of the Slavonic family of tongues and the Lithuanian language; for instance, in the Handbuch der litauischen Sprache (1857). Further labours were embodied in Die Sprachen Europas (1850), Die Deutsche Sprache (1860; 5th ed. 1888), Indogermanische Chrestomathie (1869), and Litauische Märchen und Lieder (1857). His views as to the study of language, which he wished to treat as a purely natural science, have been hotly contested by Max-Müller. There is a Memoir by Lefmann (1870).