About Professor N. Van der Sijs

The visiting professor for the academic year 2021-2022 is Nicoline van der Sijs, senior researcher at the Institute of the Dutch Language in Leiden and professor emeritus of Dutch historical linguistics in the digital world at the Radboud University Nijmegen.

Nicoline van der Sijs studied Slavonic Languages and Literatures and Indo-European Comparative Linguistics in Utrecht, the Netherlands. She worked as a researcher at Utrecht University from 1975 to 1989, and at the University of Amsterdam in 1990. From 1990 to 2010 she was a freelance researcher and writer, specializing in historical linguistics and etymology. In 2001 she completed her PhD with a dissertation entitled Chronologisch woordenboek van het Nederlands.

From 2010 to 2020 she was employed as a senior researcher at the Meertens Institute, amongst others as a principal investigator of Nederlab – Laboratory for research on the patterns of change in the Dutch language and culture. In 2013 she was appointed as a part-time professor of Dutch historical linguistics in the digital world at the Radboud University Nijmegen, a position she held until her retirement in August 2021. She is currently working as a senior researcher at the Instituut voor de Nederlandse Taal in Leiden.

Nicoline van der Sijs has ample experience with crowdsourcing and (historical) corpus linguistics, and has set up a number of large databases in open access, such as etymologiebank.nl, elektronische Woordenbank van de Nederlandse Dialecten and Uitleenwoordenbank.

She is an editor of the journals Trefwoord, Internationale Neerlandistiek and Neerlandistiek, and a regular contributor to the journal Onze Taal. In 2001, Van der Sijs obtained the ANV-Visser-Neerlandiaprijs and was awarded the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds Prijs voor de Geesteswetenschappen in 2006. In 2020 her monograph 15 eeuwen Nederlandse taal won her the Onze Taal/ANV-taalboekenprijs.

Nicoline van der Sijs has a particular interest in long-term linguistic changes, and the role of language contact and language standardization. She has written more than 25 books on these subjects, and hundreds of articles.

Key publications

• Leenwoordenboek. De invloed van andere talen op het Neder­lands, 1996
• Nota bene. De invloed van het Latijn en Grieks op het Nederlands, met Jaap Engelsman, 2000
• Chronologisch woordenboek van het Nederlands. De ouderdom en herkomst van onze woorden en betekenissen (dissertation), 2001
• Etymologisch Woordenboek van het Nederlands, met Marlies Philippa, Frans Debrabandere, Arend Quak, Tanneke Schoonheim (hoofdredactie), 2003-2009, 4 delen
• Calendarium van de Nederlandse taal. De geschiedenis van het Nederlands in jaartallen, 2006
• Cookies, Coleslaw, and Stoops. The Influence of Dutch on the North-American Languages, 2009
• Nederlandse woorden wereldwijd, 2010
• Dialectatlas van het Nederlands (hoofdredactie), 2011
• Atlas van de Nederlandse taal. Editie Nederland, met Mathilde Jansen, Fieke van der Gucht en Johan de Caluwe, 2017
• 15 eeuwen Nederlandse taal, 2019
• Taalwetten maken en vinden: het ontstaan van het Standaardnederlands, 2021

About the Chair

The King Willem-Alexander Chair was created at the University of Liège in June 2017 as the result of a collaboration between the ULiège and the Embassy of the Netherlands. It aims to promote the study of Dutch language, literature and culture, and allows the University of Liège to invite eminent Dutch academics of international stature to give scientific lectures and seminars.

_{Photo : Orde van den Prince}