Dr Johanneke Sytsema
College Lecturer in Linguistics
Dr Johanneke Sytsema has an MA in German and a PhD in Old Frisian. She is especially interested in historical and comparative Germanic Linguistics, with a focus on Middle Dutch, Old Frisian, phonology and morphology.
She has diplomatically edited two Oxford-based manuscripts, Codex Unia, an Old Frisian legal text for the Frisian Academy, and the Middle Dutch ms Marshall 29 which was an AHRC-funded project. Currently she is a Researcher at the Faculty of Linguistics, Comparative Philology and Phonetics.
Johanneke teaches Linguistics at all stages of the undergraduate course, covering the General Linguistics, Grammar and Historical Linguistics papers. She also teaches Old Frisian as a paper XII Special Subject for Finals. In her current research Johanneke is comparing Middle Dutch and Middle English, focussing on prosody, rhyme and metre, suffixes and romance loanwords. She enjoys contact with students both through her teaching and through responsibility for the linguistics collections in the Taylorian and Bodleian Libraries.
Johanneke also teaches Old Frisian at the Old Frisian Summer School (OFSS). The next OFSS will be held this summer at our partner university in Groningen, the Netherlands. Information and registration can be found here, and you can view Johanneke’s lecture/taster session ‘Topics in Historical Linguistics’ (German paper IV) Strong Verbs Across English, Frisian, Dutch, Low German, High German, an introduction to the crucial place of Frisian in the history of Germanic Languages here.
Sytsema, Johanneke & Aditi Lahiri (2025). Romance Loans in Middle Dutch and Middle English: Retained or Lost? A Matter of Metre. Transactions of the Philological Society (in press). DOI: 10.1111/1467-968X.12309.
Lahiri, Aditi & Johanneke Sytsema (2018). Metrical Grouping and Cliticisation in Middle Dutch: Evidence from Verse. Transactions of the Philological Society. DOI – 10.1111/1467-968X.12124.
Sytsema, Johanneke & Aditi Lahiri (2018). Open Syllable Lengthening in Middle Dutch: Evidence from Verse. Journal of Germanic Linguistics 30/2. 167-212.
Sytsema, Johanneke (2015) Diplomatic text edition of ms Marshall 29 (Bodleian Library, Oxford).
Sytsema, Johanneke, Janet Grijzenhout and Aditi Lahiri (2014). Middle Dutch Back Vowels in Rhymes. Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 17/2: 157-183.
Sytsema, Johanneke (2014). Codex Unia: edition and reconstruction. Amsterdamer Beiträge zur älteren Germanistik 73: 497-526.
Sytsema, Johanneke (2012). Diplomatyske Utjefte Kodeks Unia (Diplomatic edition of Codex Unia).
Where next?
Linguistics
Dr Johanneke Sytsema
PhD Free University, Amsterdam
- College Lecturer in Linguistics