Professor of African Studies (Afrikanistik) at the University of Cologne between 2000 and his retirement in 2021, with a focus on comparative linguistics, language typology and anthropological linguistics.
Gerrit J. Dimmendaal (Eibergen, 1955) studied (African) linguistics, history, comparative Semitic and Literature at Leiden University (the Netherlands), where he also got his PhD in the Faculty of Arts in 1982. He was a lecturer in African linguistics at the same university till 2000, when he was appointed as Professor of African Studies at the University of Cologne (Germany). He became an honorary member of the Linguistic Society of America in 2005, and he was a distinguished visiting scholar at the Research Centre for Linguistic Typology, La Trobe University Melbourne in 2006.
Gerrit J. Dimmendaal published 10 books and around 160 articles on topics related to language, culture and cognition, with a special focus on Africa. He is also Editor of the series Grammars and Sketches of the World’s Languages: Africa with Brill Publishers (Leiden)
Key publications
Dimmendaal, G. J. (2011). Historical Linguistics and the Comparative Study of African Languages. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Dimmendaal, G. J. (2015). The Leopard’s Spots: Essays on Language, Cognition, and Culture. Leiden: Brill.
Schneider-Blum, G. J., Hellwig, B., & Dimmendaal, G.J. (Eds.). (2018). Nuba Mountain Language Studies: New Insights. Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe. 2020.
Vossen, R., & Dimmendaal, G.J. (Eds.). (2020). The Handbook of African Languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dimmendaal. G. J. (2022). Nurturing Language – Anthropological Linguistics in an African Context. Berlin und New York: De Gruyter Mouton.