Guus Kroonen


Guus J. Kroonen is a Dutch historical linguist specializing in Indo-European studies. He is an associate professor at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics and a Professor with Special Responsibilities at the University of Copenhagen. He is the author of Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Germanic, which has been reviewed in the peer-reviewed journal Diachronica.

Career

Kroonen holds MAs from Leiden University and the University of Amsterdam. He completed his PhD at Leiden University and has held research and teaching posts at Leiden and Copenhagen. His PhD supervisor was Sasha Lubotsky, who also supervised the Indo-European Etymological Dictionary project to which Kroonen later contributed the Proto-Germanic volume.
He has led or collaborated on interdisciplinary projects in archaeolinguistics and linguistic prehistory, including the ERC Starting Grant project The Linguistic Roots of Europe’s Agricultural Transition.

Research

Kroonen’s research focuses on Germanic and Indo-European historical linguistics, etymology, and prehistoric language contact. He has argued for an 'agricultural substrate' component in Proto-Germanic—non-Indo-European lexical elements related to early farming—set out in a frequently cited chapter on non-Indo-European root nouns in Germanic.

Publications

Books

  • Selected chapters

  • Reception

Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Germanic received a substantive review in Diachronica noting its breadth within the Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary series. This is a series of texts, by a team of authors centred around Leiden, and intended as an updated replacement for Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, Pokorny.