Hans Van de Velde visiting professor King Willem-Alexander Chair at University of Liège

King Willem-Alexander Chair

The King Willem-Alexander Chair for the study of the Netherlands, established at the University of Liège in June 2017, is the result of a collaboration between the University of Liège and the Dutch Embassy. The Chair aims to promote the study of Dutch history, society, culture, language and literature. Thanks to the support of the Embassy, the Dutch section of the Department of Modern Languages has the privilege of inviting an internationally renowned Dutch academic each year to give lectures and academic talks on topics related to his or her field of expertise.

Prof. Hans Van de Velde is the eighth academic to be invited to this Chair. Previously, the 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), held the Chair.

About Hans Van de Velde

Hans Van de Velde (1969) grew up in Uitbergen (BE) 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.