Almost everyone has opinions about language, and almost no one has been taught anything about it. That gap is the reason I have now spent many years writing, broadcasting and teaching outside the university as well as inside it. I believe that this is much more than a sideline to the research; it is where much of the research finds its questions, and I also believe that especially the humanities have a role in keeping everything we know about humans, their past, their thinking, their art, etc., alive.
Most of this work is deliberately in Dutch, my mother tongue and my main topic of interest. A public conversation about the Dutch language has to be held in Dutch, with the people who speak it. There are also exceptions, like the online course described at the bottom of this page.
Neerlandistiek
Neerlandistiek is an open-access daily platform for the study of Dutch language and literature, read by researchers, teachers and interested outsiders alike. It publishes some eight items a day, among them a column of mine on roughly three hundred days a year. I have been its editor-in-chief since 2016, and in 2025 I established the foundation that now carries it. In the same year the platform received the Visser-Neerlandia Prize of the General Dutch Association. More about how it was built is on the Leadership and Academic Service page.
Newspapers, magazines and radio (selection)
- Onze Taal, the Dutch language society: contributor since 1997, staff writer between 1997 and 2006, and since 2002 co-editor, with Erik Dams, of the newsletter Taalpost (which has approximately 150,000 subscribers).
- A weekly language column on Radio Noord-Holland, 2004–2018, and regular appearances on national radio and television.
- Universiteit van Nederland: five filmed public lectures, Hoe werkt taal? (2015).
- Editorial work for a national television series on language (2005) and a regional one on dialect (2011).
Books for a general readership
Roughly twenty books, from Tongval. Hoe klinken Nederlanders? (1996) to the Atlas van het dialect in Nederland, written with Kristel Doreleijers, Alexia Kerkhof and Sterre Leufkens, which Lannoo publishes on 22 September 2026. Others include Het dialectendoeboek (2022), Viraal Nederland (2021), Een mooie mengelmoes. Meertaligheid in de Gouden Eeuw (2018), the Dialectatlas van het Nederlands (2011) and Een wereldtaal. Geschiedenis van het Esperanto (2004). The full list is on the Books page.
Digital and citizen science (selection)
- Project Laurens Jz. Coster (1996–1999), the first online database of classical Dutch literature, which I founded and coordinated.
- Taaldetector (2011), a dialect app with some fifty thousand users, and a finalist for the Dutch Academic Annual Prize.
- Wat je zegt ben je zelf (2024–), a science communication project funded by the Dutch Research Agenda, in which citizen scientists investigate occupational language variation.
The MOOC: Miracles of Human Language
Miracles of Human Language: An Introduction to Linguistics was made at Leiden University and released on Coursera in 2015. It has since had more than 225,000 enrolled participants, which for a while made it one of the largest introductions to linguistics anywhere. It remains free and open. It is not a new venture but an early one: it taught me most of what I know about explaining a technical field to people who have every right to find it difficult.
In 2005 the Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics gave me its lifetime achievement award for the popularisation of linguistics. This was when my life had just started, since then I have tried to justify it.