Enthusiasm for language

As a linguist who has also done research on Chinese, my first contact with the language occurred in 1986. It was a course on Dutch television called “Ni Hao.” Its popularity was astonishing — more than 10,000 people registered, and extra copies of the textbook had to be printed. It was the first time that China was exposed to the Netherlands in this way.

I attended many language courses in school, including English, German, French, Latin, and Ancient Greek. I did a course on Russian for two years, Japanese for one year, and learned some Hungarian and Polish by myself. My Dutch is becoming a bit mixed up sometimes. In the future, I want to learn Cantonese, which, I think, is melodious.

I finished my Ph.D. in linguistics at Leiden University in the Netherlands, where language studies have a long tradition. After receiving my doctoral degree, I stayed at that university to teach, including in a graduate program that was open to international students.

Chinese students opened up my eyes to the richness that the Chinese language has to offer. I had a Chinese Ph.D. student, Prof. Zhang Jisheng of East China Normal University, who came to Leiden on a grant to write a prize-winning dissertation on his native dialect — the Shaoxing dialect.

I sometimes work on the Tujia ethnic minority language, and this has also sparked my interest in other ethnic minority languages. Now I have a co-authored paper on Zhuang submitted to an international academic journal. Last year my family and I visited the region where Zhuang is spoken, and it was so interesting.