I am Professor of Dutch Language and Academic Communication at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. I study Dutch and other languages, I try to help build and run the places where that scholarship happens, preferably in new and better ways, and I explain language to people who never studied it.
Academic biography
I read language and literature at Leiden and Tilburg, specialising in computational linguistics, and stayed on to write a dissertation on vowel quality and phonological projection, defended in 1995. After a postdoctoral position in Leiden I moved to the Meertens Institute in Amsterdam and stayed until 2025 as a researcher and during various periods head of the linguistics department.
Alongside that came chairs in Amsterdam, in interlinguistics and Esperanto, and in Leiden, in phonological microvariation; since 2017 the chair in Nijmegen; and in 2024–25 the Isabelle de Charrière Chair at the Sorbonne.
Current roles
I hold the chair in Dutch Language and Academic Communication at Radboud University, where I also chair the section for Dutch linguistics. I am one of the editors of the Journal of Linguistics and editor-in-chief of Neerlandistiek, the daily platform for Dutch language and literature studies, which I helped turn from a newsletter into an organisation with a foundation behind it. I sit on the steering committee for the national Dutch studies funding programme, on the scientific council of the MSHS Sud-Est in France, and on a handful of boards that keep smaller but equally important things going — Esperanto Nederland, Yiddish lexicography, open-access publishing in linguistics.
Selected honours
Officer in the Order of Orange-Nassau (2026). Scientific member of the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities (2025). The Visser-Neerlandia Prize 2025, awarded to Neerlandistiek, of which I am editor-in-chief. Honorary member of the Royal Academy of Dutch Language and Literature in Ghent (2022) and of the Society of Dutch Literature in Leiden (2016). The LOT lifetime achievement award for the popularisation of linguistics (2005) and the AVT/Anéla dissertation prize (1996).
Contact Information
Email: marc.vanoostendorp@ru.nl
Office Address:
Radboud University
Centre for Language Studies
Erasmusplein 1
6525 HT Nijmegen
The Netherlands
Online Profiles
LinkedIn | ORCID | Radboud Profile
Wikipedia has pages about me in various languages. Please note that I am not responsible for their content in any way. (In fact, I believe in the rule that one should never meddle in one’s own Wikipedia page.)
Curriculum Vitae
📄 Download full CV (PDF, August 2026)
Personal Note
Outside linguistics, I’m interested in literature, mathematics, philosophy, sociology, politics and (classical) music. I live in Bilthoven with my wife Roberta D’Alessandro (who is also a linguist) and our daughter.
I’m always happy to hear from students, colleagues, and members of the public interested in language. Feel free to reach out. But please be a little patient, as I get quite a lot of messages at times.