Together with Antanas Salys [lt], Skardžius was the first and most prominent linguist who matured in independent Lithuania.

Skardžius worked at the University of Tübingen in West Germany in 1946–1949 and at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. in 1956–1971.

Skardžius wrote some 800 works and articles, both on purely academic subjects and on more practical issues of the everyday language.

In 1943, he published a 768-page work on word formation in Lithuanian which was supposed to be part of the planned historical grammar.

However, World War II and subsequent emigration disrupted his research plans and he published only short academic articles.

Skardčius was born in Subačius to a family of Lithuanian peasants who owned 21.5 hectares (53 acres) of land.

His professors included Kazimieras Būga, Jonas Jablonskis, Mykolas Biržiška, Eduards Volters, Juozas Tumas.

Therefore, it was decided to send two students, Skardžius and Antanas Salys [lt], to study with the Lithuanian linguist Georg Gerullis [de] who lectured at Leipzig University.

[8] Lacking qualifies staff, he occasionally taught other classes such as history of the Russian language and Old Church Slavonic.

[9] Skardžius advised Balčikonis on how best to prepare the dictionary[10] but remained critical of his efforts, particularly of spelling choices.

After he was fired from one of the jobs and was unemployed for 14 months, Skardžius began master studies of the library science at the Case Western Reserve University.

[24] His first larger published work was his PhD thesis on the Slavic loanwords in ancient Lithuanian.

However, he managed to complete only the 768-page work on word formation which was supposed to be part of the planned historical grammar.

[23] He published about 50 articles in other periodicals,[23] including in Dirva and Draugas where he had regular language sections.

[7] He defended such words as protėvis (ancestor), keliauninkas (traveler), nuosavybė (possession, property), pirmyn (forward), ūpas (mood) that were criticized by Jonas Jablonskis and Juozas Balčikonis.

[39] Skardžius also created several Lithuanian neologisms to replace foreign loanwords, some of which have been widely adopted.

[42] This was in response to a new threat – not the traditional Slavic loanwords, but an increasing use of English words and terms by the Lithuanians.

[43] Just before his death, Skardžius completed a 2,000-page six-volume dictionary of written Lithuanian; a copy of the unpublished manuscript is kept at Vilnius University Library.