George van Driem

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George van Driem is a research professor at Leiden University, where he holds the chair of Descriptive Linguistics.

He 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 formerly known as ‘Indo-Chinese’ or ‘Sino-Tibetan’. He developed the Darwinian theory of language known as Symbiosism, and he is author of the philosophy of Symbiomism. George van Driem has been conducting field studies in the Himalayas since 1983. He took his Ph.D. at Leiden in 1987. 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. Apart from his academic activities, he paraglides and a scuba dives.