Ernst W. Selmer

He was born in Funbo, Sweden as a son of Ludvig Marius Selmer (1860–1931) and Nina Maria Mathilda Westerlund (1868–1954).

He later studied in several cities abroad, such as Oxford, Montpellier, Leipzig and Marburg, in addition to being research assistant in Hamburg from 1915 to 1917.

During this stay, when he studied languages under Conrad Borchling and experimental phonetics under Giulio Panconcelli-Calzia, he collected material in Low German, allowing him to release the doctoral thesis Sprachstudien im Lüneburger Wendland in 1918.

[1] Selmer was a research fellow at the Royal Frederick University from 1917 to 1924, and from 1924 docent in the fields phonetics and Germanic philology.

He also published works about Swedish (Öland) and Norwegian dialects as well as Faroese and Zulu, but became best known for his research on Low German and North Frisian.