Thomas Olander

Short presentation

I study the Indo-European languages and their prehistory. I have mostly published on the Slavic languages, including their relationship to the Baltic languages, but I am interested in all the Indo-European language branches (Italic, Germanic, Greek, Indo-Iranian etc.), with the overarching aim of reconstructing the proto-language from which all Indo-European languages descend.

Currently my main research focus is on the Indo-European family tree, i.e. the relationship between the Indo-European language branches: is Germanic (e.g. Danish, German and English), for instance, more closely related to the Italic languages (Latin and its daughters) than to Slavic (e.g. Russian)?

This type of questions is crucial to the Indo-European homeland problem, i.e. the question of where and when Proto-Indo-European was spoken, and how it spread throughout Europe and western Asia.

I am also interested in Danish phonology, morphology and syntax and in the historical grammar of Danish.

Primary fields of research

• comparative Indo-European linguistics
• reconstruction of the Indo-European proto-language
• the relationship between the Indo-European branches
• the Indo-European homeland
• historical grammar of Slavic
• historical grammar of Baltic and Balto-Slavic
• historical grammar of other Indo-European languages
  
  

Current research

I am the leader of the research project Connecting the Dots: Reconfiguring the Indo-European family tree (2019–2023), financed by the Independent Research Fund Denmark. The purpose of the project is to examine the relationship between the Indo-European language branches, in particular the ramification after the separation of Anatolian and Tocharian. The project also examines to what extent the linguistic family tree can be correlated with the archaeological evidence.

I am also a core member of the research project LAMP: Languages and Myths of Prehistory (2020–2025), financed by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond. The project is interdisciplinary and examines the relationship between languages, material culture and myths at prehistoric stages of the Indo-European languages.

Previously I was the leader of the cross-disciplinary research project The homeland: In the footprints of the early Indo-Europeans (2015–2018), financed by the Carlsberg Foundation. The project aims at establishing where and when the earliest stages of the Indo-European language branches where spoken, thus pinning down where and when the Indo-European proto-language was spoken.

In 2015 I published a monograph on the development of the inflexional system from Proto-Indo-European to Slavic (Proto-Slavic inflectional morphology).

Teaching

I teach various Indo-European disciplines, including the historical grammar of specific Indo-European languages and Indo-European morphology.

Within the field of Danish language I have taught Danish phonetics, morphology, syntax and historical grammar

I have also taught Bulgarian language.

CV

Positions

• 2025–present: full professor of Indo-European Studies, Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics, University of Copenhagen; PI of the project The Indo-European Dark Ages Illuminated, funded by the VELUX FOUNDATION.
• 2019–2025: associate professor of Indo-European Studies, Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics, University of Copenhagen; PI of the project Connecting the Dots: Reconfiguring the Indo-European family tree, funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark.

• 2015–2018: associate professor of Indo-European Studies, Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics, University of Copenhagen; PI of the project The Homeland: In the footprints of the early Indo-Europeans, funded by the Carlsberg Foundation

• 2014–2015: part-time lecturer in Indo-European Studies, Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics, University of Copenhagen

• 2012–2013: associate professor (non-tenured) at the project Roots of Europe (funded by the University of Copenhagen as a Programme of Excellence), Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics, University of Copenhagen

• 2008–2012: postdoc at the project Roots of Europe (funded by the University of Copenhagen as a Programme of Excellence), Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics, University of Copenhagen; project: Proto-Slavic inflectional morphology

• 2006–2008 Danish lecturer at University of Sofia, Bulgaria

• 2003–2006: PhD scholar at the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen; project: The Balto-Slavic mobile accent paradigms

• 2002–2003: teaching assistant at the Department of General and Applied Linguistics, University of Copenhagen

Degrees