Wim Jansen

Short biography

Born in Amsterdam in 1948 I passed my A-levels in 1965 and took an M.Sc. in aerospace engineering at Delft Technical University in 1970. In 1974 I joined the European Space Agency (ESA), where I worked as a project engineer and project manager until 1989. In my spare time I continued to cultivate my interest in languages. In 1989 I took an M.A. in comparative linguistics with a specialization in Basque at Leiden University. From 1989 until 1998, when I retired from ESA, I was responsible for setting up and implementing a program of scientific experimentation in the field of weightlessness research on unmanned Soviet and Russian spacecraft. During my entire career in aerospace management English and French were my formal office languages. My most frequently used languages in the field were English, German and Russian. In 1992 I had my own laboratory built in Moscow, designed for all prelaunch and postlanding work on the scientific payloads we were to fly in the years to come and for the reception of telemetry fromthe orbitingsatellites. After 5-6 major missions the funding of my program was considerably reduced and I was given an opportunity to leave the Agency. I decided to make a career switch and became a self-employed language teacher and researcher. In 2002 I was appointed to the vacant chair of Interlinguistics and Esperanto at UvA and set up a program of teaching and research. The initial full-term course in interlinguistics, which has been running annually between September and December, was complemented in 2006 by a full-term language acquisition course of Esperanto, which is held every year between February and May.

What about 'Interlinguistics and Esperanto'? In my personal biography it all happened in the reverse order, i.e. Esperanto first, to be followed by interlinguistics at a much later stage. I can only guess it must have had something to do with my father's collection of Esperanto books that triggered my first interest in the language. For a future engineer it was also evident that there was nothing in the 'uncontrolled' natural world that couldn't be redesigned by man for better performance, so why not redesign language? Learning and practicing Esperanto raised questions as to how this language works in detail and this led to further studies in esperantology, the specialized branch of descriptive linguistics that deals with the structure and the functioning of Esperanto. From there it was a small step to interlinguistics, the science of artificial languages for interhuman communication in general (planned languages or auxiliary languages are other designations for languages of this type). The foundations for my studies in esperantology and interlinguistics were laid by my specialization in comparative linguistics and Basque in particular.

Esperanto is my only L2 which comes close to what I call a mother tongue, a feeling I share with Esperanto speakers from all over the world and whichIhave addressed, both from a psychologicaland structural point of view, in my inaugural speech of September 4th, 2009 (see 'recent publications').

My wife is Italian, and Italian is our second family language, though Esperanto was the first language we had in common. We did, however, not impose it on the children, who grew up bilingually, i.e. Dutch-Italian.