Education
Sasse studied Linguistics, Indo-European, Semitics and Balkanology in Berlin, Thessaloniki and Munich. He was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy in 1970 in Munich by the Department of Semitic Languages for his dissertation Linguistische Analyse des arabischen Dialekts der Mhallamiye in der Provinz Mardin (Südosttürkei).
Career
From 1972 to 1977 he was Research Assistant at the Institut für Allgemeine und Indogermanische Sprachwissenschaft (Institute for General and Indo-European Linguistics) in Munich. In 1975, he received his Habilitation with the book Die Morphophonologie des Galab-Verbs and in 1977 he was made a Professor. In 1987 he received a call from University of Cologne as the successor to Hansjakob Seiler as the Chair of General and Comparative Linguistics.
His successor in Munich was Michael Job.
Sasse retired in the Winter Semester 2008/2009 after 21 years as endowed chair at Cologne. His successor was Nikolaus P. Himmelmann.
Sasse was cofounder of the "Documentation of Endangered Languages" Initiative of the Volkswagen Foundation and he was Founding President of Dokumentation bedrohter Sprachen (DoBeS), the Society for Endangered Languages, which provided major funding for work on endangered languages. His obituary cites him as a "pioneer of modern language documentation, master in language documentation and linguistic theory".
Membership
North Rhine-Westphalia Academy for Sciences and Arts]
His prominence in the field was recognized in 2001 when he was elected a full member of the North Rhine Westphalia Academy of Sciences, Humanities, and the Arts.