Norman Zide

Norman Herbert Zide (May 30, 1928 – February 21, 2023) was an American linguist and specialist in the Munda languages. He was Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago. He taught Hindi and Urdu at the Department of South Asian Languages & Civilization at the Department of Linguistics of the University of Chicago for four decades and published several books and articles on the subject. However, his greater fame lies in his contributions to the Munda languages and to Austroasiatic linguistics in general. He has also done considerable work as a translator, especially of poetry. In The Oxford Anthology of Modern Indian Poetry, he did or assisted in translations of poetry from both North Indian and Austroasiatic languages. His undergraduate education was at Columbia University where he majored in French. In the 1950s he began to do graduate work in South Asian languages and linguistics.

In India, he carried out linguistic fieldwork in many places, but especially in Orissa and Bihar.

Zide died on February 21, 2023, at the age of 94.