Norman Zide

Norman H. Zide (born 1928) is the Professor Emeritus of the Department of South Asian Languages & Civilization the Department of Linguistics at the University of Chicago. He taught Hindi and Urdu there 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 has done linguistic fieldwork in many places, but especially in Orissa and Bihar, where the numbers of tribal speakers are the highest.