Carl Meinhof

Carl Meinhof (born July 23, 1857, Barzwitz, near Schlawe, Pomerania, Prussia [now in Poland]—died February 10, 1944, Greifswald, Germany) was a German scholar of African languages and among the first Europeans to study them systematically. He made notable contributions to the study of Bantu languages beginning in the 1890s.

Meinhof was first a secondary school teacher, and then for 17 years he was a pastor at Zizow (today Cisowo, Poland). His meetings with local people while on Christian missionary trips in Africa sparked his interest in the languages of Africa. When a Duala man came to Meinhof for tutoring in German, he was convinced instead to teach the Duala language to Meinhof.

In 1899 Meinhof published Grundriss einer Lautlehre der Bantusprachen (“Outline of the Phonetics of the Bantu Languages”), detailing the sound-shifting laws of six modern Bantu languages and postulating a Proto-Bantu that was their predecessor.

In 1902 Meinhof went to Zanzibar on a government stipend, and from 1903 to 1909 he taught at the Seminar für Orientalische Sprachen in Berlin. His second principal publication appeared in 1906, Grundzüge einer vergleichenden Grammatik der Bantusprachen (“Principles of the Comparative Grammar of the Bantu Languages”), a study of the morphology of the Bantu languages. From 1909 until his death Meinhof was on the staff of the Kolonial-institut in Hamburg. He also studied and published on Afro-Asiatic languages. He joined the Nazi Party during the 1930s.

Meinhof’s Die moderne Sprachforschung in Afrika (1910) was translated as An Introduction to the Study of African Languages (1915) by Alice Werner.