Carl Meinhof
Carl Meinhof (1857–1944) was a German linguist and one of the first scholars to study African languages. He was born in Barzwitz, in what was then the Province of Pomerania.
Meinhof studied at the University of Tübingen and the University of Greifswald. In 1905 he became a professor at the School of Oriental Studies in Berlin. He joined the Nazi Party in 1933.
His best-known work focused on the Bantu languages, building on earlier work by Wilhelm Bleek. He examined common Bantu languages such as Swahili and Zulu to find similarities and differences. He studied noun classes, noting that Bantu languages have many classes. He often defined classes differently, sometimes counting plural and singular forms as separate classes. Not all languages have all 22 (later 23) classes, but some come close: Venda has about 20, Lozi about 18, and Ganda around 16–17 depending on how a certain class is counted. Every Bantu language has a noun class for humans (and other animate beings).
Meinhof also studied other African language groups, such as Kordofanian, Bushman, Khoikhoi, and Hamitic languages. He created a broad classification system for African languages that was influential for many years, though it was later superseded by Joseph Greenberg’s system in the 1950s and 1960s. His work helped shape how people thought about African tongue structure, including phonetics, with influences that carried through the period.
In 1902 he made some of the earliest recordings of East African music. In 1912 he published Die Sprachen der Hamiten (The Languages of the Hamites) and used the term Hamitic. His classification linked certain language groups to beliefs about race and origins, which are now viewed as problematic. He also introduced the idea of “Nilo-Hamitic” languages, based on features like gender, but later scholars showed these languages were Nilotic and shared vocabulary with other Nilotic languages.
Carl Meinhof was the great-uncle of Ulrike Meinhof, a German journalist who helped found the Red Army Faction in the 1970s–80s.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 07:18 (CET).