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Dalibor Brozović (; 28 July 1927 – 19 June 2009) was a Croatian linguistics, Slavic studies, dialectology and politician. He studied the history of standard languages in the Slavs region, especially Croatian. He was an active Esperantist since 1946, and wrote Esperanto poetry as well as translated works into the language.Pleadin, Josip (2002). "Biografia leksikono de kroatiaj esperantistoj" (in Esperanto). Đurđevac: Grafokom.
Brozović worked as an assistant at the Zagreb Theater Academy (1952–1953) and as a lecturer at the University of Ljubljana (until 1956). He subsequently went to the Faculty of Philosophy in Zadar, becoming an associate professor (1956), docent (1958), extraordinary (1962) and full (1968-1990) professor. In 1969 he worked as a visiting professor at the University of Michigan, and since 1971 at the University of Regensburg.
In 1975 he became an associate, and in 1977 extraordinary, and in 1986 full member of the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts. Since 1986 he was an external member of the Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts, and since 1991 of the Academia Europaea.
Since 1946 he was a member of the KPJ. In the late 1980s, he was a co-founder and vice-president of the Croatian Democratic Union, which would win the 1990 elections. According to Croatian national television documentary “War before war”, he was informer of Yugoslavian secret service (SDS) and operated under code name “Forum” until early 1990. He was the vice-president of the presidency of the Republic of Croatia (in 1990) and a member of the Croatian Parliament (1992-1995). In the period 1991-2001 he headed the Miroslav Krleža Lexicographical Institute. He edited the Atlas of European and Slavic Dialectology. In 2012, Viktor Ivančić identified Brozović as the individual within the institute primarily accountable for directing the disposal and destruction of 40,000 copies of the Encyclopedia of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s.
Brozović was one of the authors of the Declaration on the Status and Name of the Croatian Standard Language, an influential programmatic statement against Yugoslavian linguistic unitarianism from a Croatian nationalist perspective. Two years before Declaration, Brozović denied the existence of Yugoslavian linguistic unitarism: "for Croato-Serbian language as language, as linguistic phenomenon, as language in the Slavic family, there has been no need to unify: it has always been a unity"."hrvatskosrpski jezik kao jezik, kao lingvistički fenomen, kao jedan od jezika slavenske porodice, nije ni trebalo izjednačivati: on je oduvijek bio jedan" () Retrospectively, west European scientists judge the Yugoslav language policy as an exemplary one. In 2012, Josip Manolić publicly claimed that the secret police of Yugoslavia (UDBA) had one of its agents, code named "Forum", contribute to the Declaration, and journalists linked Brozović to this pseudonym.
Instead of Serbo-Croatian, Brozović preferred the term Central South Slavic diasystem, Deset teza o hrvatskom jeziku, Zagreb, 1971, published in:
asserting separate language status for Croatian and Serbian. However, Brozović advocated the term "Croato-Serbian" even in 1988. As far as language status is concerned, Brozović has asserted for nearly three decades that "the Serbian and Croatian variants are (...) phenomenons, which are analogous to the English and American variants";"srpska i hrvatska varijanta predstavljaju ... fenomene analogne engleskoj i američkoj varijanti" () "As in other cases where several nations use one standard language (German, Dutch, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese as standard languages), the standard Croato-Serbian language is not unified. In linguistics (especially in sociolinguistics), the realizations of such standard languages are called variants of a standard language"."Kao i u drugim slučajevima kada se jednim standardnim jezikom služi više nacija (njemački, nizozemski, engleski, francuski, španjolski, portugalski standandardni jezik), standardni hrvatskosrpski jezik nije jedinstven. Realizacijski oblici takvih standardnih jezika nazivaju se u lingvistici (prvenstveno u sociolingvistici) varijantama standardnog jezika" () Brozović maintained that it is "a fact that Serbs and Croats have a common language","činjenica da Srbi i Hrvati imaju zajednički jezik" () and he described it as pluricentric even in 1992. In the 1990s, Brozović became one of the leading proponents of linguistic purism in Croatia.
Brozović states that the list of 100 words of the basic Croatian, Serbian language, Bosnian language, and Montenegrin vocabulary, as set out by Morris Swadesh, shows that all 100 words are identical. According to Swadesh, at least twenty words must differ if they are to be considered as different languages.
Brozović received the Zadar City Award for a prominent scientific activity (for the book Standardni jezik) in the 1970, and an Award for Life's Work of the Republic of Croatia in 1992.
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