In his work, Meinhof looked at the common Bantu languages such as Swahili and Zulu to determine similarities and differences.

All Bantu languages have a noun class specifically for humans (sometimes including other animate beings).

Meinhof also examined other African languages, including groups classified at the time as Kordofanian, Bushman, Khoikhoi, and Hamitic.

In 1912, Carl Meinhof published Die Sprachen der Hamiten (The Languages of the Hamites).

[3] Carl Meinhof was the great-uncle (the brother of the grandfather) of Ulrike Meinhof, a well known German journalist, who later became a founding member of the Red Army Faction (RAF), a left-wing militant group operating chiefly in West Germany in the 1970s and 1980s.