Ferdinand Kittel (7 April 1832 – 18 December 1903) was a Lutheran priest and indologist with the Basel Mission in south India and worked in Mangalore, Madikeri and Dharwad in Karnataka.

This earned rebuke from the Basel Mission, where he was already an outsider on account of his North German origin and academic education (the other missionaries were chiefly from southwest Germany and the lower/middle classes, though Gottfried Weigle had studied at Tübingen).

He returned to Germany, but visited India again in his fifties to complete his dictionary, which by then had become for him an end in itself, and not merely an instrument secondary to missionary work.

[4] Kittel worked in Mangalore, Madikeri and Dharwad in Karnataka, inspired by and attracted to Kannada Literature.

[2] In 1862, Kittel, published his Kannada poem `Kathamale' which presented the life of Jesus Christ in the form of Indian musical metre style.

On the Initial Failure and the Posthumous Success of the Missionary Ferdinand Kittel (1832–1903), edited by Reinhard Wendt, describes various aspects of his work.