Gijsbert Rutten is a Director of Education at the Centre of Linguistics.

More information about Gijsbert Rutten

Fields of interest

• History of Dutch
• Language variation and change
• Historical and contemporary sociolinguistics

Research projects

My current projects are:

• Pardon my French? Dutch-French Language Contact in the Netherlands, 1500-1900 (NWO Free Competition, 2018-2023).
• Pluricentricity in language history. Building blocks for an integrated history of Dutch, 1550-1850 (FWO, 2017-2022).

Previous projects include:

2013-2018
Going Dutch. The Construction of Dutch in Policy, Practice and Discourse, 1750-1850 (NWO VIDI-Grant)

2009-2013
Letters as Loot. Towards a Non-Standard View on the History of Dutch (Universiteit Leiden)

2009
Language Use, Language Norms and Linguistic Identities in the United Kingdom of the Netherlands. A Historical Sociolinguistic Perspective on Southern Dutch in the Early Nineteenth Century (Visiting Postdoctoral Research Fellow, FWO-Vlaanderen; Vrije Universiteit Brussel)

2008
Historische Sociolinguïstiek van het Nederlands (Grant from the Niels Stensen Stichting; Vrije Universiteit Brussel & University of Helsinki)

2007
Historical Linguistics “from below” (NWO Rubicon Grant; Universiteit Leiden)

Workshops and conferences

2018
Workshop Pluricentricity from a historical-sociolinguistic perspective at ICS-2 (Budapest). Co-organized with Rik Vosters (Brussels).

Historical Sociolinguistics Network (HiSoN) conference Making Waves in Historical Sociolinguistics in Leiden. Co-organized with Marijke van der Wal, Andreas Krogull, Bob Schoemaker, Ingrid Tieken and Jos Schaeken.

2017
Workshop Revisiting Haugen: Alternative models of standardization at ICLaVe, Malaga. Co-organized with Rik Vosters (Brussels).

Colloquium Monolingual Histories – Multilingual Practices. Issues in historical language contact in Ghent. Co-organized with Rik Vosters (Brussels).

2016
Workshop Effects of prescriptivism in language history in Leiden. With: Lieselotte Anderwald (Kiel), Stephan Elspaß (Salzburg), Shana Poplack (Ottawa), Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade (Leiden), Rik Vosters (Brussels).

2015
Workshop at the SLE in Leiden: Managing Multilingualism - Contacts, attitudes and planning in historical contexts. Co-organized with Joe Salmons (Madison), Wim Vandenbussche (Brussels) and Rik Vosters (Brussels). 

2014
Thematic panel on Language Ideologies and Standardization at the international HiSoN conference Historical Discourses on Language and Power. Co-organized with Kristine Horner (Sheffield)

2012
Thematic panel at the Sociolinguistics Symposium 19 (Berlin) on Romance-Germanic Language Contact and Conflict in the Low Countries. Co-organized with Catharina Peersman (Sheffield) and Rik Vosters (Brussels)

2011
International conference in Leiden: Touching the past. Ego-documents in a historical and linguistic perspective. Co-organized with Marijke van der Wal, Ingrid Tieken and Jos Schaeken

2011
Workshop in Leiden on the Construction Grammar of Dutch. Co-organized with Ronny Boogaart and Timothy Colleman (Ghent)

2010
Thematic panel at the Sociolinguistics Symposium 18 (Southampton) on Comparative Historical Sociolinguistics. Co-organized with Terttu Nevalainen (Helsinki

Teaching activities

I teach courses at all levels on topics such as:

• the history of Dutch
• historical linguistics
• language variation and change
• contemporary and historical sociolinguistics

Publications