Werner H Veith was born 1940 in Neuwied, capital of a Rhenish principality. He studied at Marburg and Giessen Universities, Hesse, and received a Ph.D. from Marburg University in 1966. From 1966 to 1969 he was Assistant Professor of German at Georgetown University and Lecturer at Howard University, both in Washington, D.C., and he was Research Assistant in Marburg from 1969 to 1972. He received his Habilitation (2nd doctorate) in 1971, was Professor in Marburg 1972–1975 and Professor in Munich 1973–1974, and has been Professor of Descriptive Linguistics (German Department) in Mainz since 1975. His main fields of publishing are dialectology (4 vols. of a German dialect atlas), technical terminology, orthography, sociolinguistics, and theoretical and comparative linguistics (about 150 publications).