Frederik Kortlandt

Who is Frederik Kortlandt?

Frederik Herman Henri Kortlandt is a professor of descriptive and comparative linguistics at Leiden University in the Netherlands. He is an expert on Baltic and Slavic languages, the Indo-European languages in general, and Proto-Indo-European, though he has also published studies of languages in many other language families. He has also studied ways to associate language families into super-groups such as Indo-Uralic.

Kortlandt, along with George van Driem and a few other colleagues, is one of the proponents of the Leiden School of linguistics, which describes language in terms of a meme or benign parasite.

Kortlandt holds five degrees from the University of Amsterdam:

B.A., 1967, Slavic Linguistics and Literature

B.A., 1967, mathematics and economics

M.A., 1969, Slavic linguistics

M.A., 1970, mathematical economics

Ph.D., 1972, mathematical linguistics

Kortlandt is a member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences and a Spinozapremie laureate. In 2007, he composed a version of Schleicher's fable, a story written in a hypothetical reconstruction Proto-Indo-European, which differs radically from all previous versions.