The new visiting professor for the eighth edition of the King Willem-Alexander Chair for Dutch Studies is Hans Van de Velde, senior researcher at the Fryske Akademy and professor of sociolinguistics at Utrecht University.

After professors Joseph Theodoor Leerssen (2017-2018), René Boomkens (2018-2019), Gloria Wekker (2019-2020/2020-2021), Nicoline van der Sijs (2021-2022), Frank van Vree (2022-2023), Margriet van der Waal (2023-2024) and Johan Heilbron (2024-2025), the visiting professor for the eighth edition of the King Willem-Alexander Chair for Dutch Studies is Hans Van de Velde.

Hans Van de Velde (1969) grew up in Uitbergen and studied Germanic Philology at Ghent University. During his studies, he taught Dutch to French speakers during the summer holidays. After graduating, he moved to the Netherlands to conduct sociolinguistic research at Radboud University Nijmegen. He obtained his PhD in 1996 with a study on variation and change in the pronunciation of Standard Dutch. He then returned to Belgium and became a lecturer in Dutch at the Université libre de Bruxelles. However, the academic prospects in the Netherlands were more appealing, and in 2002 he became assistant professor in sociolinguistics at Utrecht University. In 2014, he moved even further north to become a senior researcher at the Fryske Akademy. Since 2019, he has also been professor of sociolinguistics at Utrecht University, with a special focus on the language situation in Fryslân.

Van de Velde is an expert in the field of language variation and language change, standardisation processes, sociophonetics and r-sounds. His research over the past 35 years has focused strongly on regional variation in Dutch, but he has also studied other languages and language varieties – often in collaboration with students and PhD candidates – such as Bahasa Indonesia, English, Greko, Mandarin, Syriac and Wu. At the Fryske Akademy, he studies Frisian, Dutch and the mixed varieties spoken in Fryslân, has led numerous projects in the field of digital language tools for Frisian and has co-developed research tools.

Van de Velde has been a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania (2003), Université Catholique de Louvain (2005), University of Florida (2007), Nanjing University (2010, 2015) and Universität Zürich (2017, 2018). He is co-editor of the Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde, and a member of the editorial boards of Taal & Tongval and World Histories of Lexicography and Lexicology. He is chair of the board of LOT – Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics.