George van Driem

George "Sjors" van Driem (born March 19, 1957 in Nassawadox, Virginia) has been a research professor at Leiden University since December 1999, and where he holds the chair of Descriptive Linguistics.

Background

Van Driem earned a B.S. in biology at the University of Virginia in 1979, an M.S. in Slavic languages and linguistics at Leiden University in 1983, and a Ph.D. in linguistics at Leiden in 1987, with a doctoral dissertation on the grammar of Limbu, a language of Eastern Tibet.

Research

Van Driem directs the Himalayan Languages Project and participates in the research program Languages and Genes of the Greater Himalayan Region. He is an authority on Tibeto-Burman, a language family often considered a subgroup of Sino-Tibetan. He developed the Darwinian theory of language known as Symbiosism, and he is author of the philosophy of Symbiomism. Van Driem has been conducting field studies in the Himalayas since 1983. He was commissioned by the Royal Government of Bhutan to codify a grammar of the national language Dzongkha, design a phonological romanisation for the language known as Roman Dzongkha, and complete a survey of the languages and language communities of the kingdom. He and native Dzongkha speaker Karma Tshering co-authored the authoritative textbook on Dzongkha. George van Driem has also written grammars of Limbu, Dumi and the Bumthang language and a two-volume ethnolinguistic handbook of the greater Himalayan region. Since 2001, van Driem has also done field work with geneticist Peter de Knijff taking DNA samples from over 2,000 volunteers throughout Nepal and Bhutan while indicating the native language of each volunteer, to study the correlation of genes and languages.

Apart from his academic activities, he paraglides and scuba dives.