After the first chairholder Prof. Felix Ameka took his retirement from Leiden University last spring, CIPL and the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics joined forces to find a successor, who was found in Dr. Rik van Gijn, specialist in the indigenous languages of Latin America. He started his new job with effect from January.
Rik van Gijn (Leiden University Centre for Linguistics) obtained his PhD at the Radboud University Nijmegen (2006), during which he wrote a grammatical description of the Bolivian isolate language Yurakaré. Two subsequent grants from the Volkswagen Stiftung, carried out at the Max-Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (2006-2011) led to a multimedia archive of Yurakaré language use. His subsequent NWO-VENI project (2009-2012) studied subordination strategies in indigenous South American languages, and what similarities and differences between the language profiles might tell us about the histories of their speakers. This latter question was also central in his subsequent projects, carried out by a large team at the University of Zurich (2012-2019), which looked at the historical development of morphological profiles across several continents. Currently he is concluding an ERC consolidator project at Leiden University (2019-2025), which focuses on reconstructing aspects of the human past in western South America by combining signals from geography, cultural anthropology, genetics, and linguistics. In Januari 2025, Van Gijn started an NWO Open Competition L grant (with Derek Karssenberg at Utrecht University) that more specifically zooms in on the role of biophysical factors on socio-historical processes, and eventually the distribution of linguistic diversity.
Van Gijn’s teaching experience at Radboud University, the University of Zurich, Leiden University and several guest institutions includes the languages of South America, language and the human past, typology, syntax, morphology, field linguistics, descriptive linguistics, contact linguistics, and language endangerment. He is currently writing a textbook for typology with colleagues Alena Witzlack-Makarevich and Steven Moran. His PhD supervision includes descriptive/documentary, comparative and language vitality projects. Van Gijn is board member of the Centre for Indigenous America Studies, the Stichting Bedreigde Talen, the advisory council of LUCL Leiden, LOT, and the program board of Latin America Studies in Leiden.
Van Gijn plans to carry out/has carried out the following activities in his first year as part of the chair Ethnolinguistic Diversity and Vitality in the World.
On December 4, he gave a keynote address at the Simposio Ecología de Lenguas, organized by RALSAS (Red de Archivos Lingüísticos y Socioculturales en marcha en América del Sur) and supported by CIPL. Another invited lecture is planned for November 15 2025 in York at the invitation of the Philological Society.
On 20-21 January 2025, Van Gijn (with Alba Hermida Rodríguez, Matheus Azevedo, and Saskia Dunn) hosted a workshop at Leiden University that brought together archaeologists, ethnohistorians, geneticists and linguists with the aim to increase our understanding of the population history of Bolivia, a linguistically highly diverse area. On 27-28 March, Van Gijn, together with Leonardo Arias and Nicholas Emlen, organizes a workshop in Pucallpa, Peru, in collaboration with the Universidad Nacional Intercultural de la Amazonía (UNIA) on linguistic diversity in the Peruvian lowlands, also meant to discuss possible future collaborations with UNIA. Between 30 June and 4 July 2025, Van Gijn organizes a workshop at the International Congress of Americanists in Novi Sad, Serbia, together with Anja Hasse and Peter Bakker, which focuses on the linguistic consequences of intermarriage. In the fall (precise dates to be determined), he plans a workshop on methods for reconstructing the history of small language families and isolates in Ghent, together with Abbie Hantgan-Sonko and Bernat Bardagil.
Apart from these activities, Van Gijn will be focusing on an NWO Open Competition project aimed at a better understanding of the interaction between biophysical circumstances, socio-historical processes, and the development of linguistic diversity. His teaching program includes courses focusing on language diversity and vitality, such as Language Typology, the Languages of Latin America, and Language Endangerment and Vitality. He will be (co-)supervising 7 PhD students with ongoing projects on language description and documentation, dialectology, areal typology, language contact, and language endangerment and vitality.
