Hans Van de Velde is chair of sociolinguistics at Utrecht University and senior researcher at the Fryske Akademy in Leeuwarden/Ljouwert (the Netherlands), where he organised ICLaVE|10. He is a specialist in language variation and change, sociophonetics and standardization processes and worked a lot on regional variation in Dutch and on the characteristics of /r/. At the Fryske Akademy he researches the Frisian minority language, Dutch and the mixed varieties spoken in the Fryslân province. He is also responsible for the digital research infrastructure for Frisian and the development of Frisian language tools, such as the online Dutch-Frisian dictionary, spell checkers, automatic translation and speech recognition.