The Most Famous

LINGUISTS from Germany

This page contains a list of the greatest German Linguists. The pantheon dataset contains 214 Linguists, 28 of which were born in Germany. This makes Germany the birth place of the most number of Linguists.

Top 10

The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the top 10 most legendary German Linguists of all time. This list of famous German Linguists is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography’s online popularity. Visit the rankings page to view the entire list of German Linguists.

1. Max Müller (1823 - 1900)

With an HPI of 73.34, Max Müller is the most famous German Linguist. His biography has been translated into 50 different languages on wikipedia.

Friedrich Max Müller (German: [ˈfʁiːdʁɪç ˈmaks ˈmʏlɐ]; 6 December 1823 – 28 October 1900) was a comparative philologist and Orientalist of German origin. He was one of the founders of the Western academic disciplines of Indology and religious studies. Müller wrote both scholarly and popular works on the subject of Indology. He directed the preparation of the Sacred Books of the East, a 50-volume set of English translations. Müller became a professor at Oxford University, first of modern languages, then of comparative philology in a position founded for him, and which he held for the rest of his life. Early in his career he held strong views on India, believing that it needed to be transformed by Christianity. Later, his view became more nuanced, championing ancient Sanskrit literature and India more generally. He became involved in several controversies during his career: he was accused of being anti-Christian; he disagreed with Darwinian evolution, favouring theistic evolution; he raised interest in Aryan culture, deeply disliking the resulting racism; and he promoted the idea of a "Turanian" family of languages. Among his honours and distinctions, he was made an associé étranger of the French Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres; he was awarded the Bavarian Maximilian Order for Science and Art; and he was made a member of the Privy Council of the United Kingdom.

2. Franz Bopp (1791 - 1867)

With an HPI of 67.64, Franz Bopp is the 2nd most famous German Linguist. His biography has been translated into 51 different languages.

Franz Bopp (German: [ˈfʁants ˈbɔp]; 14 September 1791 – 23 October 1867) was a German linguist known for extensive and pioneering comparative work on Indo-European languages. Bopp was born in Mainz, but the political disarray in the Republic of Mainz caused his parents' move to Aschaffenburg, the second seat of the Archbishop of Mainz. There he received a liberal education at the Lyceum and Karl Joseph Hieronymus Windischmann drew his attention to the languages and literature of the East. (Windischmann, along with Georg Friedrich Creuzer, Joseph Görres, and the brothers Schlegel, expressed great enthusiasm for Indian wisdom and philosophy.) Moreover, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich von Schlegel's book, Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier (On the Speech and Wisdom of the Indians, Heidelberg, 1808), had just begun to exert a powerful influence on the minds of German philosophers and historians, and stimulated Bopp's interest in the sacred language of the Hindus. In 1812, he went to Paris at the expense of the Bavarian government, with a view to devoting himself vigorously to the study of Sanskrit. There he enjoyed the society of such eminent men as Antoine-Léonard de Chézy (his primary instructor), Silvestre de Sacy, Louis Mathieu Langlès, and, above all Alexander Hamilton (1762–1824), cousin of the American statesman of the same name , who had acquired an acquaintance with Sanskrit when in India and had brought out, along with Langlès, a descriptive catalogue of the Sanskrit manuscripts of the Imperial Library. In the library, Bopp had access not only to the rich collection of Sanskrit manuscripts (mostly brought from India by Jean François Pons in the early 18th century), but also to the Sanskrit books that had been issued from the Calcutta and Serampore presses. He spent five years of laborious study, almost living in the libraries of Paris and unmoved by the turmoils that agitated the world around him, including Napoleon's escape, the Waterloo campaign and the Restoration. The first paper from his years of study in Paris appeared in Frankfurt am Main in 1816, under the title of Über das Konjugationssystem der Sanskritsprache in Vergleichung mit jenem der griechischen, lateinischen, persischen und germanischen Sprache (On the Conjugation System of Sanskrit in comparison with that of Greek, Latin, Persian and Germanic), to which Windischmann contributed a preface. In this first book, Bopp entered at once the path on which he would focus the philological researches of his whole subsequent life. His task was not to point out the similarity of Sanskrit with Persian, Greek, Latin or German, for previous scholars had long established that, but he aimed to trace the postulated common origin of the languages' grammatical forms, of their inflections from composition. This was something no predecessor had attempted. By a historical analysis of those forms, as applied to the verb, he furnished the first trustworthy materials for a history of the languages compared. After a brief sojourn in Germany, Bopp travelled to London where he made the acquaintance of Sir Charles Wilkins and Henry Thomas Colebrooke. He also became friends with Wilhelm von Humboldt, the Prussian ambassador at the Court of St. James's, to whom he taught Sanskrit. He brought out, in the Annals of Oriental Literature (London, 1820), an essay entitled "Analytical Comparison of the Sanskrit, Greek, Latin and Teutonic Languages" in which he extended to all parts of grammar what he had done in his first book for the verb alone. He had previously published a critical edition, with a Latin translation and notes, of the story of Nala and Damayanti (London, 1819), the most beautiful episode of the Mahabharata. Other episodes of the Mahabharata, Indralokâgama, and three others (Berlin, 1824); Diluvium, and three others (Berlin, 1829); a new edition of Nala (Berlin, 1832) followed in due course, all of which, with August Wilhelm von Schlegel's edition of the Bhagavad Gita (1823), proved excellent aids in initiating the early student into the reading of Sanskrit texts. On the publication, in Calcutta, of the whole Mahabharata, Bopp discontinued editing Sanskrit texts and confined himself thenceforth exclusively to grammatical investigations. After a short residence at Göttingen, Bopp gained, on the recommendation of Humboldt, appointment to the chair of Sanskrit and comparative grammar at the University of Berlin in 1821, which he occupied for the rest of his life. He also became a member of the Royal Prussian Academy the following year. In 1827, he published his Ausführliches Lehrgebäude der Sanskritsprache (Detailed System of the Sanskrit Language), on which he had worked since 1821. Bopp started work on a new edition in Latin, for the following year, completed in 1832; a shorter grammar appeared in 1834. At the same time he compiled a Sanskrit and Latin Glossary (1830), in which, more especially in the second and third editions (1847 and 1868–71), he also took account of the cognate languages. His chief activity, however, centered on the elaboration of his Comparative Grammar, which appeared in six parts at considerable intervals (Berlin, 1833, 1835, 1842, 1847, 1849, 1852), under the title Vergleichende Grammatik des Sanskrit, Zend, Griechischen, Lateinischen, Litthauischen, Altslawischen, Gotischen und Deutschen (Comparative Grammar of Sanskrit, Zend [Avestan], Greek, Latin, Lithuanian, Old Slavonic, Gothic and German). How carefully Bopp matured this work emerges from the series of monographs printed in the Transactions of the Berlin Academy (1824–1831), which preceded it. They bear the general title Vergleichende Zergliederung des Sanskrits und der mit ihm verwandten Sprachen (Comparative Analysis of Sanskrit and its related Languages). Two other essays (on the Numerals, 1835) followed the publication of the first part of the Comparative Grammar. Old Slavonian began to take its stand among the languages compared from the second part onwards. E. B. Eastwick translated the work into English in 1845. A second German edition, thoroughly revised (1856–1861), also covered Old Armenian. In his Comparative Grammar Bopp set himself a threefold task: to give a description of the original grammatical structure of the languages as deduced from their inter-comparison. to trace their phonetic laws. to investigate the origin of their grammatical forms. The first and second points remained dependent upon the third. As Bopp based his research on the best available sources and incorporated every new item of information that came to light, his work continued to widen and deepen in the making, as can be witnessed from his monographs on the vowel system in the Teutonic languages (1836), on the Celtic languages (1839), on the Old Prussian (1853) and Albanian languages (Über das Albanesische in seinen verwandtschaftlichen Beziehungen, Vienna, 1854), on the accent in Sanskrit and Greek (1854), on the relationship of the Malayo-Polynesian to the Indo-European languages (1840), and on the Caucasian languages (1846). In the last two, the impetus of his genius led him on a wrong track. He is the first philologist to prove Albanian as a separate branch of Indo-European. Bopp was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1855 and an international member of the American Philosophical Society in 1863. Critics have charged Bopp with neglecting the study of the native Sanskrit grammars, but in those early days of Sanskrit studies, the great libraries of Europe did not hold the requisite materials; if they had, those materials would have demanded his full attention for years, and such grammars as those of Charles Wilkins and Henry Thomas Colebrooke, from which Bopp derived his grammatical knowledge, had all used native grammars as a basis. The further charge that Bopp, in his Comparative Grammar, gave undue prominence to Sanskrit is disproved by his own words; for, as early as 1820, he gave it as his opinion that frequently, the cognate languages serve to elucidate grammatical forms lost in Sanskrit (Annals of Or. Lit. i. 3), which he further developed in all his subsequent writings. The Encyclopædia Britannica (11th edition of 1911) assesses Bopp and his work as follows: Bopp's researches, carried with wonderful penetration into the most minute and almost microscopical details of linguistic phenomena, have led to the opening up of a wide and distant view into the original seats, the closer or more distant affinity, and the tenets, practices and domestic usages of the ancient Indo-European nations, and the science of comparative grammar may truly be said to date from his earliest publication. In grateful recognition of that fact, on the fiftieth anniversary (May 16, 1866) of the date of Windischmann's preface to that work, a fund called Die Bopp-Stiftung, for the promotion of the study of Sanskrit and comparative grammar, was established at Berlin, to which liberal contributions were made by his numerous pupils and admirers in all parts of the globe. Bopp lived to see the results of his labours everywhere accepted, and his name justly celebrated. But he died, on the 23rd of October 1867, in poverty, though his genuine kindliness and unselfishness, his devotion to his family and friends, and his rare modesty, endeared him to all who knew him. English scholar Russell Martineau, who had studied under Bopp, gave the following tribute: Bopp must, more or less, directly or indirectly, be the teacher of all who at the present day study, not this language or that language, but language itself — study it either as a universal function of man, subjected, like his other mental or physical functions, to law and order, or else as an historical development, worked out by a never ceasing course of education from one form into another. Martineau also wrote: "Bopp's Sanskrit studies and Sanskrit publications are the solid foundations upon which his system of comparative grammar was erected, and without which that could not have been perfect. For that purpose, far more than a mere dictionary knowledge of Sanskrit was required. The resemblances which he detected between Sanskrit and the Western cognate tongues existed in the syntax, the combination of words in the sentence and the various devices which only actual reading of the literature could disclose, far more than in the mere vocabulary. As a comparative grammarian he was much more than as a Sanskrit scholar, ... [and yet] it is surely much that he made the grammar, formerly a maze of Indian subtilty, as simple and attractive as that of Greek or Latin, introduced the study of the easier works of Sanskrit literature and trained (personally or by his books) pupils who could advance far higher, invade even the most intricate parts of the literature and make the Vedas intelligible. The great truth which his Comparative Grammar established was that of the mutual relations of the connected languages. Affinities had before him been observed between Latin and German, between German and Slavonic, etc., yet all attempts to prove one the parent of the other had been found preposterous. Baynes, T. S., ed. (1878), "Francis Bopp" , Encyclopædia Britannica, vol. 4 (9th ed.), New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, pp. 49–50 Martineau, Russell (1867), "Obituary of Franz Bopp", Transactions of the Philological Society, London: 305–14 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911), "Bopp, Franz", Encyclopædia Britannica, vol. 4 (11th ed.), Cambridge University Press, pp. 240–241 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Rines, George Edwin, ed. (1920), "Bopp, Franz" , Encyclopedia Americana, vol. 4, pp. 261–262 Franz Bopp, "A Comparative Grammar, Volume 1", 1885, at the Internet Archive.

3. August Schleicher (1821 - 1868)

With an HPI of 65.68, August Schleicher is the 3rd most famous German Linguist. His biography has been translated into 42 different languages.

August Schleicher (German: [ˈaʊɡʊst ˈʃlaɪçɐ]; 19 February 1821 – 6 December 1868) was a German linguist. Schleicher studied the Proto-Indo-European language and devised theories concerning historical linguistics. His great work was A Compendium of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-European Languages in which he attempted to reconstruct the Proto-Indo-European language. To show how Indo-European might have looked, he created a short tale, Schleicher's fable, to exemplify the reconstructed vocabulary and aspects of Indo-European society inferred from it.

4. Jost Gippert (b. 1956)

With an HPI of 63.91, Jost Gippert is the 4th most famous German Linguist. His biography has been translated into 67 different languages.

Jost Gippert (German pronunciation: [ˈjoːst ˈgɪpʰɐt]; born 12 March 1956 in Winz-Niederwenigern, later merged to Hattingen) is a German linguist, Caucasiologist, author, and the professor for Comparative Linguistics at the Institute of Empirical Linguistics at the Goethe University of Frankfurt.

5. Johann Martin Schleyer (1831 - 1912)

With an HPI of 63.48, Johann Martin Schleyer is the 5th most famous German Linguist. His biography has been translated into 44 different languages.

Johann Martin Schleyer (German pronunciation: [ˈjoːhan ˈmaʁtiːn ˈʃlaɪɐ]; 18 July 1831 – 16 August 1912) was a German Catholic priest who invented the constructed language Volapük. His official name was "Martin Schleyer"; he added the name "Johann" (in honor of his godfather) unofficially.

6. Johann Christoph Adelung (1732 - 1806)

With an HPI of 63.12, Johann Christoph Adelung is the 6th most famous German Linguist. His biography has been translated into 37 different languages.

Johann Christoph Adelung (8 August 1732 – 10 September 1806) was a German grammarian and philologist.

7. Michel Bréal (1832 - 1915)

With an HPI of 61.23, Michel Bréal is the 7th most famous German Linguist. His biography has been translated into 33 different languages.

Michel Jules Alfred Bréal (French: [miʃɛl bʁeal]; 26 March 1832 – 25 November 1915), French philologist, was born at Landau in Rhenish Palatinate. He is often identified as a founder of modern semantics. He was also the creator of the modern marathon race, having proposed its first running at the 1896 Olympic Games and offered what would become known as Breal's Silver Cup to the winner. Michel Bréal was born at Landau in Germany of French-Jewish parents. After studying at Wissembourg, Metz and Paris, he entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1852. In 1857 he went to Berlin, where he studied Sanskrit under Franz Bopp and Albrecht Weber. On his return to France he obtained an appointment in the department of oriental manuscripts at the Bibliothèque Impériale. In 1864 he became professor of comparative grammar at the Collège de France, in 1875 member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-lettres, in 1879 inspecteur général for higher education until the abolition of the office in 1888. In 1890 he was made commander of the Legion of Honour. He resigned his chair in 1905, and died in Paris. In 1883, Bréal coined the term semantics in the article “Les lois intellectuelles du langage. Fragment de sémantique” published in the journal Annuaire de l'association des études grecques en France (page 133). Bréal is credited with the invention of the marathon race. He attended the 1894 Founding Congress of the International Olympic Committee at the Sorbonne in Paris; at its concluding dinner, he was seated next to the father of the modern games, Pierre de Coubertin. Soon after the congress, on September 15, 1894, Bréal sent Coubertin a letter outlining his idea: Puisque vous allez à Athènes, voyez donc, si l’on peut organiser une course de Marathon au Pnyx. Cela aura une saveur antique. Si nous savions le temps qu’a mis le guerrier grec, nous pourrions établir le record. Je réclamerais pour ma part l’honneur d’offrir « la Coupe de Marathon ». Translation: Since you are going to Athens, see if we can organize a Marathon race at the Pnyx. This would have an antique flavor. If we knew how long the Greek warrior took, we could set the distance. For my part, I would claim the honor of offering the "Marathon Cup." The legend of the ancient run — the run of the Greek soldier Pheidippides to announce victory at the Battle of Marathon to either Athens — had become more culturally prominent in late 19th-century Europe. Robert Browning's 1879 poem "Pheidippides" had brought the story to wider attention, as had an 1890 archeological dig of the Marathon tumuli. Before Bréal's proposal, the 1896 Olympics had not planned any races longer than 1500 meters; some argued that such a long distance was "contrary to the principles of sport and of hygiene." As part of his sponsorship of the race, Bréal had a Paris jeweler create Breal's Silver Cup for the winner, who ended up being the Greek Spyros Louis. Among his works, which deal mainly with mythological and philological subjects, may be mentioned: L'Étude des origines de la religion zoroastrienne (1862), for which a prize was awarded him by the Académie des Inscriptions Hercule et Cacus (1863), in which he disputes the principles of the symbolic school in the interpretation of myths Le Mythe d'Œdipe (1864) Les Tables eugubines (1875) Mélanges de mythologie et de linguistique (2nd. ed., 1882) Leçons de mots (1882, 1886) Dictionnaire étymologique latin (1885) Grammaire latine (1890). Essai de sémantique (1897), on the signification of words, which was translated into English by Mrs Emmeline Cust with preface by J. P. Postgate. a translation of Bopp's Comparative Grammar (1866–1874), with introductions, which is highly valued. He also wrote pamphlets on education in France, the teaching of ancient languages, and the reform of French orthography. In 1906 he published Pour mieux connaitre Homère. Hans W. Giessen, Heinz-Helmut Lüger, Günther Volz (Hrsg.): Michel Bréal – Grenzüberschreitende Signaturen. Verlag Empirische Pädagogik, Landau 2007 ISBN 3-9373-3363-0 Hans W. Giessen & Heinz-Helmut Lüger: Ein Grenzgänger der ersten Stunde. Michel Bréal: Vom Marathon zum Pynx in: Dokumente. Zs. für den deutsch-französischen Dialog. Gesellschaft für übernationale Zusammenarbeit, Bonn. Heft 4 / 2008, pp. 59 – 62 ISSN 0012-5172 Hans W. Giessen: Mythos Marathon. Von Herodot über Bréal bis zur Gegenwart. (= Landauer Schriften zur Kommunikations- und Kulturwissenschaft. Band 17). Verlag Empirische Pädagogik, Landau 2010, ISBN 978-3-941320-46-8. Heinz-Helmut Lüger (dir.), Hans W. Giessen (dir.) et Bernard Weigel (dir.), Entre la France et l'Allemagne : Michel Bréal, intellectuel engagé, Limoges, Lambert-Lucas, 2012 (ISBN 978-2-35935-043-2) Brigitte Nerlich: Michel Bréal: mettre l’homme dans la langue. In: Penser l’histoire des savoirs linguistiques. Hommage à Sylvain Auroux. Textes réunis par Sylvie Archaimbault Jean-Marie Fournier & Valérie Raby, 611-619. Lyon: ENS, 2013. (ISBN 978-2-84788-417-3). Jan Noordegraaf: Salient scholars. Michel Bréal and his Dutch connections. In: Penser l’histoire des savoirs linguistiques. Hommage à Sylvain Auroux. Textes réunis par Sylvie Archaimbault Jean-Marie Fournier & Valérie Raby, 621-632. Lyon: ENS, 2013. (ISBN 978-2-84788-417-3). http://hdl.handle.net/1871/51333 Michel Bréal Society, Michel-Bréal-Gesellschaft

8. Georg Friedrich Grotefend (1775 - 1853)

With an HPI of 61.19, Georg Friedrich Grotefend is the 8th most famous German Linguist. His biography has been translated into 30 different languages.

Georg Friedrich Grotefend (9 June 1775 – 15 December 1853) was a German epigraphist and philologist. He is known mostly for his contributions toward the decipherment of cuneiform. Georg Friedrich Grotefend had a son, named Carl Ludwig Grotefend, who played a key role in the decipherment of the Indian Kharoshthi script on the coinage of the Indo-Greek kings, around the same time as James Prinsep, publishing Die unbekannte Schrift der Baktrischen Münzen ("The unknown script of the Bactrian coins") in 1836.

9. Vasily Radlov (1837 - 1918)

With an HPI of 60.53, Vasily Radlov is the 9th most famous German Linguist. His biography has been translated into 31 different languages.

Vasily Vasilievich Radlov or Friedrich Wilhelm Radloff (Russian: Васи́лий Васи́льевич Ра́длов; 17 January [O.S. 5 January] 1837 in Berlin – 12 May 1918 in Petrograd) was a German-Russian linguist, ethnographer, and archaeologist, often considered to be the founder of Turkology, the scientific study of Turkic peoples. According to Turkologist Johan Vandewalle, Radlov knew all of the Turkic languages and dialects as well as German, French, Russian, Greek, Latin, Manchu, Mongolian, Chinese, Arabic, Persian, and Hebrew.

10. Friedrich August Wolf (1759 - 1824)

With an HPI of 58.81, Friedrich August Wolf is the 10th most famous German Linguist. His biography has been translated into 26 different languages.

Friedrich August Wolf (German: [vɔlf]; 15 February 1759 – 8 August 1824) was a German classicist who is considered the founder of classical and modern philology.

People

Pantheon has 33 people classified as German linguists born between 1732 and 1956. Of these 33, 2 (6.06%) of them are still alive today. The most famous living German linguists include Jost Gippert, and Christiane Nord. The most famous deceased German linguists include Max Müller, Franz Bopp, and August Schleicher. As of April 2024, 5 new German linguists have been added to Pantheon including Georg Curtius, Hermann Osthoff, and Eduard Sievers.