Charles Sacleux

Charles Joseph Sacleux (1856–1943) was a French Catholic missionary and linguist. He is known also as a botanist, having collected a herbarium of over 2000 plants in East Africa and Zanzibar.

He was born on 5 July 1856 at Enquin in northern France, the son of Auguste Sacleux who died when he was aged 5, and his wife Marie Firmine Bayart. He joined the Holy Ghost Fathers in 1875, after two years of seminary, and became a priest in 1878.

Sacleux went to Zanzibar in 1879, and was posted to Bagamoyo. In 1878 he returned to France, and took a position at Chevilly. He died at Grasse on 16 May 1943.

Sacleux wrote:

• Essai de phonétique avec son application à l'étude des idiomes' (1905)
• Grammaire des dialectes swahilis (1909)
• Dictionnaire swahili-français (1939).

His dictionary of the Comorian language was published in 1979 in two volumes by Mohamed Ahmed Chamanga and Noël Jacques Gueunier.