Michiel de Vaan

University of Lausanne

Michiel Arnoud Cor de Vaan (; born 1973) is a Dutch linguist and Indo-Europeanist. He taught comparative Indo-European linguistics, historical linguistics and dialectology at the University of Leiden until 2014, when he moved to the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. De Vaan had been at the University of Leiden since 1991, first as a student and later as a teacher.

He has published extensively on Limburgian, Dutch, Germanic, Albanian, Indo-Iranian and Indo-European linguistics and philology. He has published more than 100 papers, has written several books and has edited conference proceedings and a handbook of Indo-European. He wrote the etymological dictionary of Latin and other Italic languages as a contributor to the Leiden-based Indo-European Etymological Dictionary project.

De Vaan’s work has received praise, with the classicist Jonathan Powell claiming that the dictionary will be of “substantial value” to Indo-Europeanists. Powell commended the text for its supposed usage of “up to date” information and “modern conclusions on the sound changes between IE and Latin. Likewise, the linguist Rex Wallace stated that the wok “suits the needs of specialists” and that the etymologies presented in the text reflected “the latest developments in the field of Indo-European linguistics.” However, Powell criticized de Vaan for a perceived lack of proper attention to semantics in certain etymologies and potential “perfunctory” underemphasis on “remodelling or onomatopoeia, which tend to interfere with the operation of the sound-laws.”