Greenberg, Joseph Harold

Greenberg, Joseph Harold, 1915–, American anthropologist and linguist, b. New York City, grad. Columbia (A.B., 1936) and Northwestern Univ. (Ph.D., 1940). He was a professor of anthropology at Columbia (1948–62), afterward joining (1962) the faculty of Stanford Univ. His first major area of research was the classification of African languages, which he divided into four families: Niger-Kordofanian, Afroasiatic, Nilo-Saharan, and Khoisan. He later became interested in language universals. Among his writings are The Languages of Africa (1963), Anthropological Linguistics (1968), Language, Culture, and Communication (1971), and Universals of Human Language (1978).