Sigismund Koelle

Sigismund Wilhelm Kölle (July 14, 1820, Cleebronn-February 18, 1902, London) was a German missionary, and pioneer scholar of the languages of Africa.

After training in a missionary house in Basel, he transferred in 1845 to the Church Mission Society based in London. From 1847 he was in Sierra Leone, where he taught at Fourah Bay College. There he collected a large sample of linguistic material, some of it from freed slaves. His major work, Polyglotta Africana (1854), began the serious study by European scholars of a large range of African languages

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