Diedrich Westermann

Born in Germany in 1875, Diedrich Hermann Westermann first trained for missionary work and was sent to Togoland, where his close study of Ewe helped define the direction of his life. He later became known not only as a missionary but as an Africanist, linguist, and ethnographer whose work reached far beyond his original field experience.

Westermann built on and revised earlier scholarship on African languages, and he is widely regarded as one of the founders of modern African linguistics. He taught in Berlin and published important studies on African language classification and culture, including work that brought wider scholarly attention to the diversity and structure of languages across the continent.

He died in 1956, leaving behind a body of work that influenced later generations of linguists and Africanists. I could not confirm a reliable portrait photograph from the sources I checked, so the image field uses a book-cover image instead of a portrait.