The Chair-holder Ethnolinguistic Vitality and Diversity in the World is dr. Rik van Gijn, professor at the Centre for Linguistics, Leiden University, the Netherlands.
His interests focus on the indigenous languages of South America, and in particular on the question of the historical development of the stunning linguistic diversity there. Currently he focuses on these questions in the context of his NWO Open Competition project on disentangling the roles of social and biophysical factors in shaping linguistic diversity. His teaching experience includes the languages of South America, typology, morphology, field linguistics, descriptive linguistics, and contact linguistics.
Rik van Gijn starts a new research group with colleagues in Latin America. See below The agreement between members of the Universidad Nacional Intercultural de la Amazonía (UNIA) in Pucallpa, Peru, and former members of the ERC consolidator project the Population history of South America Revisited (SAPPHIRE) to form a research group that has as its goal the cooperation between the parties in future research projects and teaching.
