His research focuses on etymology, historical phonology, morphology and prosody, and dialectology.
[1] Pronk studied Slavic languages and literature and Comparative Indo-European linguistics at Leiden University,[2] where he also passed his viva (in 2009) with a dissertation "The Slovene dialect of Potschach in the Gailtal, Austria".
[3] Pronk is widely recognised as a leading specialist in comparative Indo-European linguistics and Slovene dialectology and in that capacity has been one of the authors of the Croatian Etymological Dictionary.
[4] In recent years, Pronk has widened his academic scope and is now involved in debates surrounding the origins of Proto-Indo-European and its relation with Anatolian languages.
Together with Alwin Kloekhorst, he published a volume on the Precursors of Proto-Indo-European,[5] and has presented some of his ideas on the spread of Proto-Indo-European in various scholarly conferences, including at the 2019 European Association of Archaeologists's Annual Meeting in Bern, Switzerland.