[1] He was born in Virovitica, where he attended primary school and the gymnasium in Varaždin, Požega and Zagreb.

He graduated in 1878, receiving a diploma in classical and Slavic philology at the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb.

[1] In 1890 he became a full member of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, and served as its president from 1915 to 1918.

[1] Maretić was a polyglot with a wide education, a prolific linguist, the main representative of the so-called Croatian Vukovars, responsible for the consistent codification of Novoštokavian as a literary language and for the introduction of phonological orthography, advocating for the linguistic unity of Croatian and Serbian.

Criticized immediately after its publication because it was not based on Croatian literature but mainly on folk songs and works by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić and Đura Daničić, this grammar was, for its time, the most comprehensive description of classical Novoštokavian language.