Michiel de Vaan is a Dutch

Dutch people

The Dutch people are an ethnic group native to the Netherlands. They share a common culture and speak the Dutch language. Dutch people and their descendants are found in migrant communities worldwide, notably in Suriname, Chile, Brazil, Canada, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, and the United...

 linguist and Indo-Europeanist

Indo-European studies

Indo-European studies is a field of linguistics dealing with Indo-European languages, both current and extinct. Its goal is to amass information about the hypothetical proto-language from which all of these languages are descended, a language dubbed Proto-Indo-European , and its speakers, the...

, professor at the University of Leiden where he teaches comparative Indo-European linguistics, historical linguistics

Historical linguistics

Historical linguistics is the study of language change. It has five main concerns:* to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages...

 and dialectology

Dialectology

Dialectology is the scientific study of linguistic dialect, a sub-field of sociolinguistics. It studies variations in language based primarily on geographic distribution and their associated features...

.

He has published extensively on Germanic

Germanic languages

The Germanic languages constitute a sub-branch of the Indo-European language family. The common ancestor of all of the languages in this branch is called Proto-Germanic , which was spoken in approximately the mid-1st millennium BC in Iron Age northern Europe...

, Albanian

Albanian language

Albanian is an Indo-European language spoken by approximately 7.6 million people, primarily in Albania and Kosovo but also in other areas of the Balkans in which there is an Albanian population, including western Macedonia, southern Montenegro, southern Serbia and northwestern Greece...

, and Indo-Iranian

Indo-Iranian languages

The Indo-Iranian language group constitutes the easternmost extant branch of the Indo-European family of languages. It consists of three language groups: the Indo-Aryan, Iranian and Nuristani...

 linguistics and philology. He published more than 35 papers, wrote 3 books and edited 1 monograph. He wrote the etymological dictionary of Latin and other Italic languages

Italic languages

The Italic subfamily is a member of the Indo-European language family. It includes the Romance languages derived from Latin , and a number of extinct languages of the Italian Peninsula, including Umbrian, Oscan, Faliscan, and Latin.In the past various definitions of "Italic" have prevailed...

 as a contributor to Leiden based Indo-European Etymological Dictionary

Indo-European Etymological Dictionary

The Indo-European Etymological Dictionary is a research project of the Department of Comparative Indo-European Linguistics at Leiden University, initiated in 1991 by Peter Schrijver and others....

project.

He wrote the followings books:

• Introducción al avéstico (with Javier Martínez; 2001, Ediciones Clásicas, Madrid. 140 pp.)
• The Avestan Vowels (2003, Rodopi, Amsterdam/Atlanta. 710 pp.)
• Germanic Tone Accents. (editor, 2006, Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Franconian Tone Accents, Leiden, 13-14 June 2003. Zeitschrift für Dialektologie und Linguistik - Beiheft 131. Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart)
• Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages (2008, Leiden etc.: Brill. 825 pp.)