Ekkehard König (born 15 January 1941) is a German linguist and Professor Emeritus at the Free University of Berlin, specializing in linguistic typology, semantics, and the linguistics of English.

Ekkehard König was born in Jäschkittel in the Province of Lower Silesia (now Poland) and grew up in Bavaria. He studied general linguistics and modern languages at the University of Kiel (1960–1967), as well as the University of Newcastle (1963–1964) and the University of Edinburgh (1965–1966). He was an assistant lecturer at the University of Reading in 1967–68. He received his doctoral degree from the University of Stuttgart in 1970, and completed his habilitation qualification in 1973 at the same university, while working as an assistant professor.

König became full professor of English linguistics at the University of Hanover in 1973, and moved on to the Free University of Berlin in 1988. He retired in 2009, and has since then been affiliated with the University of Freiburg.

König's main contributions are in the area of semantics, linguistic typology (especially the typology of European languages), and the contrastive linguistics of English and German.

Between 1990 and 1995, he was the director of a European Science Foundation coordination programme on the typology of the languages of Europe (EUROTYP), which brought together over a hundred linguists from many different countries of Europe. Other prominent members of this project were Simon Dik, Giuliano Bernini, Östen Dahl, Gilbert Lazard, Frans Plank, Anna Siewierska, Johan van der Auwera, Harry van der Hulst, Henk van Riemsdijk, Nigel Vincent, as well as König's junior collaborator (and doctoral student) Martin Haspelmath. The project results were published in nine volumes by De Gruyter, and one of the consequences of this coordination programme was the founding of the Association for Linguistic Typology, with its journal Linguistic Typology.

König investigated a wide range of grammatical phenomena, especially from a semantic-pragmatic, typological, and diachronic perspective. Some topics that stand out in his contributions are adjectives,^[1] focus particles,^[2] concessive and concessive conditional clauses,^[3] self-intensifiers,^[4] manner demonstratives,^[5] and definite articles.^[6]

König has coedited a large number of books, including an important handbook on linguistic typology and universals, and he served as a panel member for the European Science Foundation and the European Research Council. He is a former president of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft (1997–2000). He is currently one of the editors of the journal Studies in Language.

• Max Planck Research Award for International Cooperation (2002)
• Member of Academia Europaea
• Corresponding member of Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres