Harald Haarmann

Harald Haarmann (born 1946) is a German linguist and cultural scientist who lives and works in Finland. Haarmann studied general linguistics, various philological disciplines and prehistory at the universities of Hamburg, Bonn, Coimbra and Bangor. He obtained his PhD in Bonn (1970) and his habilitation (qualification at professorship level) in Trier (1979). He taught and conducted research at a number of German and Japanese universities and is a member of the Research Centre on Multilingualism in Brussels. Since 2003, he has been Vice-President of the Institute of Archaeomythology (headquartered in Sebastopol, California) and director of its European branch (based in Luumäki, Finland).

Haarmann is the author of more than 40 books in German, English, Spanish, Hungarian Bulgarian Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and nearly 200 articles and essays in ten languages. He has also edited and co-edited some 20 anthologies. His preferred fields of study are cultural history, archaeomythology, history of writing, language evolution, contact linguistics and history of religion. In 1999, Haarmann received the Prix Logos awarded by the Association européenne des linguistes et des professeurs de langues (Paris), and the Premio Jean Monnet (see also Jean Monnet) for essay writing. In 1987, a thesis appeared on the topic "Typological analysis and social conditions of languages in the works of Harald Haarmann" in Milan.