Born in Stuttgart, Germany; studies in Classics, Romance philology and philosophy at different universities (Kiel, Germany; Innsbruck, Austria; Poitiers, France; Salamanca, Spain). Holds a PhD in Classics from the university of Kiel (1965). From 1965 to 1971 he was assistant professor (to Harald Weinrich) at the University of Cologne; after his habilitation in 1971 (Romance philology, linguistics) he became associate professor at the university of Bielfeld, and, in 1975, full professor at the newly founded university of Siegen. In 1978 he changed to Freiburg i.Br., Germany. Since April 2007 he is professor emeritus.

In Freiburg he founded a special research center on the topic of "Orality and Literacy" (1985--1996). He was speaker of this center and he is co-editor of its series ScriptOralia , which encompasses more than one hundred thirty volumes actually.

Since 1977 he is active in the promotion, evaluation and assessment of research (German Research Council, Wissenschaftsrat, Alexander v. Humboldt Foundation and other European institutions active in this domain). Between 1990 and 1993 he was intensively engaged in evaluating and transforming the research institutions of the former German Democratic Republic.

In 1986 he was elected member of the Heidelberg Academy of Humanities and Sciences ; in 1990 he was awarded the Research Prize of Baden-Württemberg; in 1992 he received the Leibniz Prize of the German Research Council (highest German scholarly award). Holds the Werner Heisenberg medal of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

From 1992 to 2006 he is member of the Board of the four universities in Grenoble : Institut National Polytechnique, Université Joseph Fourier, Université Pierre Mendès France, Université Stendhal. (Since 2015, the three last ones have been restructured into one administrative body under the heading of Université Grenoble Alpes.) From 2001 to 2005 he serves as member of the board of the Evaluation Agency Baden-Württemberg.

He has published in the domain of Romance and general linguistics as well as in Romance and Gereral literary science, in text linguistics, in the domain of language typology and language universals as well as in Finnish linguistics and, due to his activity in the special research center on orality and literacy, also in cultural anthropology. For more detailed information see Google Scholar.

Among the nearly 40 scholars he supervised, fourteen are teaching as full professors or lecturers at German or foreign universities, half of them being women: Trudel Meisenburg (U Osnabrück), Maria Selig (U Regensburg), Claudia Riehl (LMU Munich), Damaris Nübling (JGU Mainz), Doris Tophinke (U Paderborn), Barbara Job (U Bielefeld), Sibylle Kriegel-Haase (U Aix-en-Provence); the others are Hartwig Kalverkämper (HU Berlin), Ralph Ludwig (MLU Halle [Saxony-Anhalt]), Thomas Haye (GAU Göttingen), Heiner Böhmer (TU Dresden), Johannes Niehoff-Panagiotidis (FU Berlin), Juan Carlos Palazuelos Montecinos (Pontificia U Católica, Chile), Alfonso Gallegos Shibya (U Guadalajara, México).

Like his now retired linguistic colleague Hans-Martin Gauger (and the research group "Poetik und Hermeneutik") he has a thorough aversion against the so called Festschriften: to him they are nothing but a bad habit and a sign of human vanity which should be overcome. As a consequence, he has ceased, from 1987 onward, to contribute to Festschriften for others as well.

More information can be found in Wikipedia, in "Kürschners deutscher Gelehrtenkalender", in "Wer ist wer in Deutschland?" and in "Who is who in the world?"

Raible has been married to Hannelore Putzke since 1966. He has three sons and seven grandchildren.