Ranko Matasović (May 14, 1968) is a Croatian linguist, Indo-Europeanist and Celticist.
He was born and raised in Zagreb where he attended primary and secondary school. At the Faculty of philosophy at the University of Zagreb he graduated linguistics and philosophy, receiving M.A. in linguistics in 1992 and Ph.D. in 1995 under the supervision of Radoslav Katičić with the thesis A Theory of Textual Reconstruction in Indo-European Linguistics. He received research fellowship at the University of Vienna (1993) and University of Oxford (1995), post-doctoral Fulbright Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin during 1997/1998 with Andrew Sihler as an advisor, and also Alexander von Humboldt Foundation fellowship at the University of Bonn in 2002/2003.
He currently holds a chair at the Department of Linguistics at the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb, where he teaches courses on comparative Indo-European grammar, Celtic studies and language typology. His research interest include comparative Indo-European grammar (especially of Celtic and Balto-Slavic languages), language typology and syntax, and Latin, Celtic and Hittite philology. He contributes to the project of Indo-European Etymological Dictionary organized by the Leiden University by making An etymological lexicon of Proto-Celtic.
In 2002 he received an award of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts for a lasting contribution to philology, and in 2006 he finally became an associate member of the same institution.
He published more than 50 papers in Croatian and foreign-language journals, and translated various works from Latin, Ancient Greek, Lithuanian, Hittite, Old and modern Irish, Welsh and English.