37.745, All: Obituary Vincent van Heuven

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LINGUIST List: Vol-37-745. Mon Feb 23 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.745, All: Obituary Vincent van Heuven

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Date: 21-Feb-2026
From: Lisa Cheng [L.L.Cheng at hum.leidenuniv.nl]
Subject: Obituary Vincent van Heuven


Vincent van Heuven passed away unexpectedly on Friday 6 February 2026
at the age of 76 at his home in Kûbaard (Friesland), the Netherlands.
For more than three decades, Vincent van Heuven was the director of
the Phonetics Lab at the Faculty of Humanities in Leiden University,
where he held the position of Professor Experimental Linguistics and
Phonetics (from 2000 to 2013). After his retirement from Leiden, he
held a professorship at the University of Pannonia in Hungary (from
2014 to 2019).
Not only was he at the forefront of digitalisation of education and
research at the Leiden Faculty of Humanities, he also played a
prominent role in the management of the Linguistics Institute in the
faculty. He held guest professorships at the University of Groningen,
Nankai University (Tianjin, China) and the Fryske Akademy
(Leeuwarden), he was a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts
and Sciences (KNAW), and was in the editorial board of Nederlandse
Taalkunde, Phonetica and Journal of Phonetics.
He obtained his PhD in 1978 with a dissertation entitled Spelling en
lezen. Hoe tragisch zijn de werkwoordsvormen? (Spelling and reading.
How tragic are the verb forms?) After his graduation, he extended his
research domain to a range of topics including prosody, acoustics,
intelligibility, synthesis, processing and acquisition of language and
speech.
     Vincent van Heuven was a passionate and dedicated researcher, who
had an excellent sense of the development of the field, such that he
managed to acquire many research projects. He had an impressive list
of publications and was the supervisors of dozens of PhD
dissertations. He always knew how to draw the best out of his
students, and he was always ready to help his colleagues with their
research. Everyone who had worked with him in any way learned from
him. During his whole career, he worked with students and researchers
from all over the world, as his intellectual curiosity extended far
beyond the languages of the Netherlands. His emphasis on the
significance of empirical data as well as rigorous research was
instrumental in the development of Leiden’s phonetics lab into a
global hub for phonetics research.
     Everyone who spent time in the phonetics lab, as a guest or as a
colleague, became a member of Vincent’s phonetics family, a community
that was very inspiring, thanks to the warm and collegial atmosphere
in the lab — which can all be attributed to Vincent’s inimitable
humour, razor-sharp intellect as well as his ability to connect
people.
Vincent stayed intellectually active after his retirement, as he
remained involved in research projects as well as in the supervision
of PhD candidates, both inside and outside the Netherlands. The newest
edition of the textbook Algemene fonetiek (General phonetics), which
Vincent co-wrote with Toni Rietveld, which generations of linguistics
students in the Netherlands grew up with, was basically finalized a
couple of days before he died.
We will miss him tremendously.

Linguistic Field(s): Phonetics




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