In memoriam: Vincent van Heuven (1949-2026)
Vincent van Heuven passed away unexpectedly on Friday 6 February 2026 at the age of 76 at his home in Kûbaard (Friesland), the Netherlands.
For more than three decades, Vincent van Heuven was the director of the Phonetics Lab at the Faculty of Humanities in Leiden University, where he held the position of Professor Experimental Linguistics and Phonetics (from 2000 to 2013). After his retirement from Leiden, he held a professorship at the University of Pannonia in Hungary (from 2014 to 2019).
Not only was he at the forefront of digitalisation of education and research at the Leiden Faculty of Humanities, he also played a prominent role in the management of the Linguistics Institute in the faculty. He held guest professorships at the University of Groningen, Nankai University (Tianjin, China) and the Fryske Akademy (Leeuwarden), he was a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), and was in the editorial board of Nederlandse Taalkunde, Phonetica and Journal of Phonetics.
He obtained his PhD in 1978 with a dissertation entitled Spelling en lezen. Hoe tragisch zijn de werkwoordsvormen? (Spelling and reading. How tragic are the verb forms?) After his graduation, he extended his research domain to a range of topics including prosody, acoustics, intelligibility, synthesis, processing and acquisition of language and speech.
A passionate and dedicated researcher
Vincent van Heuven was a passionate and dedicated researcher, who had an excellent sense of the development of the field, such that he managed to acquire many research projects. He had an impressive list of publications and was the supervisors of dozens of PhD dissertations. He always knew how to draw the best out of his students, and he was always ready to help his colleagues with their research. Everyone who had worked with him in any way learned from him. During his whole career, he worked with students and researchers from all over the world, as his intellectual curiosity extended far beyond the languages of the Netherlands. His emphasis on the significance of empirical data as well as rigorous research was instrumental in the development of Leiden’s phonetics lab into a global hub for phonetics research.
Phonetics family
Everyone who spent time in the phonetics lab, as a guest or as a colleague, became a member of Vincent’s phonetics family, a community that was very inspiring, thanks to the warm and collegial atmosphere in the lab — which can all be attributed to Vincent’s inimitable humour, razor-sharp intellect as well as his ability to connect people.
Vincent stayed intellectually active after his retirement, as he remained involved in research projects as well as in the supervision of PhD candidates, both inside and outside the Netherlands. The newest edition of the textbook Algemene fonetiek (General phonetics), which Vincent co-wrote with Toni Rietveld, which generations of linguistics students in the Netherlands grew up with, was basically finalized a couple of days before he died.
We will miss him tremendously.
Leiden University Centre for Linguistics