once as 'Fogbe'). Where previous literature consisted mostly of travel journals sometimes accompanied by short word lists, Schlegel's work marked the beginning of a period of prolific lexicographic and linguistic research into the various Gbe languages. Important writers of this period include Johann Gottlieb Christaller (Die Volta-Sprachen-Gruppe, 1888), Ernst Henrici (Lehrbuch der Ephe-Sprache, 1891, actually the first comparative Gbe grammar), J. Knüsli (Ewe-German-English Vocabulary, 1892) and Maurice Delafosse (Manuel Dahoméen (Fon), 1894). In 1902 the missionary Diedrich Hermann Westermann contributed an article titled "Beiträge zur Kenntnis der Yewe-Sprachen in Togo" to Zeitschrift für Afrikanische und Oceanische Sprachen. Westermann became one of the most productive and influential writers on the Gbe languages, and his output dominated the Gbe literature and analysis of the first half of the twentieth century. He wrote mainly on the Western Gbe languages, especially on Ewe (though he often used the term 'Ewe' to denote the Gbe dialect continuum as a whole). Among his most important works on Ewe are his A Study of the Ewe language (1930) and Wörterbuch der Ewe-Sprache (1954). Renaissance du Gbe From 1930 on, publications on various Gbe languages appeared rapidly, the vast majority of them dealing with individual Gbe languages. A significant exception is formed by the extensive comparative linguistic research of Hounkpati B Christophe Capo, which resulted in an internal classification of the Gbe languages and a reconstruction of the proto-Gbe phonology. Much of the comparative research for Capo's classification of the Gbe languages was carried out in the 1970s, and partial results were published in the late 1970s and early 1980s in the form of articles on specific phonological developments in various branches of Gbe and, notably, in the form of a unified standard orthography of Gbe. In his Renaissance du Gbe (1988), the internal classification of Gbe was published in full for the first time. In 1991, Capo published a comparative phonology of Gbe. In this period, Capo also initiated Labo Gbe (Int.), the 'Laboratory for research on Gbe languages', based in Benin, which has since fostered research and published several collections of papers on the Gbe languages. In the early 1990s, SIL International initiated a study to assess which Gbe communities could benefit from existing literacy efforts and whether additional literacy campaigns in some of the remaining communities would be needed. Synchronised linguistic research carried out in the course of this study shed more light on the