H. Ekkehard Wolff is Professor and Chair Emeritus of African linguistics at Leipzig University. He is an expert on Chadic languages and African sociolinguistics with more than 200 publications to his credit. Recent publications include A Historical Phonology of Central Chadic (2022).

1. Introduction; 2. A survey of PCC historical phonology and morphophonology; 3. Major diachronic processes in Central Chadic; 4. Selected Issues in Central Chadic historical linguistics; 5. Hidden reflexes of Proto-Afroasiatic language features; 6. Outlook; Appendix A: List of reconstructed lexical items; Appendix B: List of PCC simple roots.

"Based on the author's life-long research experience, this book unearths the linguistic history of 66 unwritten and under-researched Central Chadic languages in West and Central Africa. It describes the complex historical development of the modern languages from the common proto-language and reconstructs 228 lexical items of their basic vocabulary"--