Prof. Dr. Rik Vosters

Link to webpage: www.rikvosters.be

Rik Vosters holds a PhD in historical sociolinguistics and is currently a professor (hoogleraar) in the programs of Linguistics and Literary Studies as well as Applied Linguistics at Vrije Universiteit Brussel. He serves as the coordinator of the FWO-funded research network (WOG) on historical sociolinguistics, is an active member of the Historical Sociolinguistics Network (HiSoN), and contributes to the editorial team of the Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics (De Gruyter Mouton). Additionally, he chairs the research and PhD committee of his faculty. Since 2022, he has been the chairperson of the Council for Dutch Language and Literature of the Dutch Language Union (Nederlandse Taalunie) and a member of the Koninklijke Academie voor Nederlandse Taal en Letteren (KANTL). In 2024, he assumed the role of director of B-TXT, a university-wide core facility on digital text analysis, which he oversees alongside Wouter Ryckbosch. His research interests include historical sociolinguistics, language variation and change, corpus-based sociolinguistics, sociology of language, and language planning and policy, with a particular focus on multilingual regions such as Brussels, both from contemporary and historical perspectives.