Tom Güldemann - Biography#

Tom Güldemann received his doctoral and postdoctoral training at the Universities of Leipzig and Cologne. He is currently Professor for African Linguistics and Sociolinguistics at the Humboldt University in Berlin. He works in the fields of linguistic typology, language documentation, grammatical change, and both genealogical and areal linguistics including its interface with non-linguistic disciplines for the reconstruction of early population history. In the field of typology, he has worked in particular on verbal systems, clause linkage, reported discourse, pronouns, and information structure, resulting among other things in a monograph on synchronic and diachronic aspects of quotative constructions (Güldemann 2008c).

In terms of languages, he has a strong interest in the Bantu family with a focus on southern Africa, having produced in particular a major comparative study on Bantu verb morphology (Güldemann 1996). He also specializes in the documentation and description of so-called “Khoisan” languages with field and archival work on both living and extinct languages such as Taa, Nǁng, and ǀXam of the Tuu family and ǃOra and Kwadi of the Khoe-Kwadi family. Based on this and other comparative research he has especially addressed the historical relationships among these languages within the wider perspective of the highly controversial precolonial history of southern Africa, most recently within a larger multidisciplinary EuroBabel project funded by the ESF and of which he was the leader (cf. Güldemann and Fehn 2014). At the moment, he is working among other things as editor and author on two books, one a survey of African linguistics and the other on the history of forager languages from a global perspective.