Prof. Dr. George van Driem
George van Driem occupies the chair for Language Documentation (leerstoel Beschrijvende Taalwetenschap) at Leiden University. From 1983 until its dissolution in 2004, he was with the Department of Comparative Linguistics. Since 2005, he has been a member of the Department for South and Central Asia. He teaches graduate students, gives guidance to Ph.D. fellows and post-doc scholars and acts as an advisor for governmental and non-governmental agencies.
George van Driem has conducted field research in Nepal, Bhutan, northeastern India and the western Indian Himalayas since 1983 and produced several in-depth grammars, a number of grammatical sketches and coordinated the endangered language documentation of the research team of the Himalayan Languages Project since 1993. Since 2001, he participates in Languages and Genes of the Greater Himalayan Region, a research programme which he conceived in 2000 and which is supported by the European Science Foundation. From 2002 to 2006, he coordinated the Austroasiatic languages research programme between Leiden University and l’École française d’Extrême-Orient at Siem Reap. Since 2004, he directs the European half of the Trans-Himalayan Database Programme, a Sino-European research initiative. His two-volume compendium Languages of the Himalayas is an ethnolinguistic handbook for South and Central Asia and adjacent regions.
George van Driem promulgates Symbiosism, the symbiotic theory of language. His Darwinian model of the human mind explains language as a semiotic organism, a mutualist symbiont which has arisen and evolved in the hominid brain. Some exponents of the Leiden school of language evolution conceive language to be a parasite, based on the correct insight that natural meanings have the properties of non-constructible sets in the mathematical sense. Symbiosism, however, distinguishes the mutualist nature of language from the workings of individual meanings. Language-borne ideas can be both beneficial and deleterious to the human host. Symbiomism is the school of philosophy which understands our human identity as symbiomes of a biological and a semiotic symbiont. Man is both the hominid host and the language that dwells in his brain and mediates much of his thinking. Good health is the state in which both constituent symbionts are healthy and abide in some sort of happy equilibruim.