Herrmann Jungraithmayr


Herrmann Rudolf Jungraithmayr is an Austrian Africanist and retired university professor. Until 1996, he was the chair of African linguistics at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
Herrmann Jungraithmayr is a brother of Alfred Jungraithmayr.

Career

Jungraithmayr studied African Studies, Egyptology and Ethnology at the University of Vienna and the University of Hamburg. He studied under Wilhelm Czermak and Johannes Lukas.
From 1956 to 1959, he was a lecturer at the Goethe-Institut Cairo, and taught at Orman and Ibrahimiyya high schools. In 1957, he taught German at Al-Azhar University. From 1960 to 1963, he was a research assistant at the Seminar for African Languages at the University of Hamburg. From 1963 to 1967, he was an assistant at Philipps University in Marburg, where he habilitated in 1967 and then worked as a private lecturer. In 1968/69, he was an assistant professor at Howard University in Washington, D.C. From 1972 to 1985, he was a professor of African Studies at Philipps University, Marburg. In between, he was also a visiting professor at the University of Maiduguri in Nigeria in 1983. From 1985 to 1996 he was chair of African linguistics at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main. There, he founded the Institute for African Linguistics, now known as the Institute for African Studies.

Research trips

Jungraithmayr has carried out extensive documentation of Chadic languages spoken in Central Africa.
He has found that Chadic languages are more conservative in the east than in the west.

Publications

Books