Diedrich Hermann Westermann, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death
TweetDiedrich Hermann Westermann
German linguist
Date of Birth: 
Place of Birth: Baden, Lower Saxony, Lower Saxony, Germany
About Diedrich Hermann Westermann
- Diedrich Hermann Westermann (June 24, 1875–May 31, 1956) was a German missionary, Africanist, and linguist.
- He substantially extended and revised the work of Carl Meinhof, his teacher, although he rejected some of Meinhof's theories only implicitly.
- Westermann is seen as one of the founders of modern African linguistics.
- He carried out extensive linguistic and anthropological research in the area ranging from Senegal eastwards to the Upper Nile.
- His linguistic publications cover a wide range of African languages, including the Gbe languages, Nuer, Kpelle, Shilluk, Hausa, and Guang.
- Westermann's comparative work, begun in 1911, initially brought together much of today's Niger–Congo and Nilo-Saharan language phyla under the name Sudanic languages.
- His most important later publication Die westlichen Sudansprachen 1927a divided these into East and West Sudanic languages and laid the basis for what would become Niger–Congo.
- In this book and a series of associated articles between 1925 and 1928, Westermann both identified a large number of roots that form the basis of our understanding of Niger–Congo and set out the evidence for the coherence of many of the families that constitute it.
- Much of the classification of African languages associated with Joseph Greenberg actually derives from the work of Westermann. In 1927 Westermann published a Practical Orthography of African Languages, which became later known as the Westermann script.
- Subsequently, he published the influential and oft-reprinted Practical Phonetics for Students of African Languages in collaboration with Ida C.
- Ward (1933). He was born in Baden near Bremen and also died there.
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See Also
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