Anke-Beate Stahl is an artist and linguist. Her passion for maps and languages began in her childhood in Schleswig-Holstein in northern Germany, a region peppered with German and Danish place-names. She is fluent in German, English and Swedish and is qualified to teach in Gaelic. She has a degree in English and a postgraduate degree in painting. After coming to Edinburgh as a student to learn English, she took up Swedish and Old Icelandic at the University of Edinburgh, later returning to the university to do a PhD on the place-names of Barra in the Outer Hebrides. She has published a number of papers on the subject.