Diedrich Westermann

Diedrich Westermann (born June 24, 1875, Baden, Ger.—died May 31, 1956, Baden, W.Ger.) was a German scholar of African languages and culture who refined and extended the work of Carl Meinhof, his teacher. Westermann specialized in the languages of an enormously complex linguistic region extending from the Sénégal River eastward to the upper reaches of the Nile River.

Westermann was first a missionary in Togo, western Africa, and later a professor at the Institute for Oriental Languages in Berlin. His 1911 publication, Die Sudansprachen (“The Languages of the Sudan”), paralleled Meinhof’s work on the Bantu languages: it postulated the genetic unity of a group of languages that had earlier been classified as “Mixed Negro,” and he reconstructed a parent language, “Ur-Sudan,” that preceded them. To do so, Westermann compared the structures and vocabularies of eight Sudanese languages (Ewe, Twi, Ga, Yoruba, Efik, Kunama, Nuba, and Dinka). His next major contribution was “Sprache und Erziehung” (“Language and Education”), which was Part 2 of Völkerkunde von Afrika (1940; “Ethnology of Africa”). This major classification of African languages established three major divisions: the Khoisan languages, the Negro languages (including the Sudan, Bantu, and Nilotic), and the Hamito-Semitic languages (since reorganized and now called Afro-Asiatic). In this work, his method was to draw correspondences and not conclusions, but he did implicitly reject some of Meinhof’s groupings.

Westermann’s publications on African culture include Der Afrikaner heute und morgen (1937; The African Today and Tomorrow) and Geschichte Afrikas (1952; “History of Africa”).