is the proprietor of De Taalstudio and is also the company’s director. She studied general linguistics at the University of Amsterdam and specialised in psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics. She then worked as a research assistant at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen and obtained her Ph.D at the University of Amsterdam in 1996. Her dissertation, entitled ‘Potatoes must peel’, involved an empirical investigation into the acquisition of the syntactic features of passive sentences in Dutch. From 1998 to 2000 she worked as a post-doc researcher at the Utrecht Institute for Linguistics. Between 1999 and 2003 she was mainly involved with applied linguistic research and with popularising linguistic research in the form of books, teaching materials and the documentary series Oetsiekoetsie.

Maaike Verrips on De Taalstudio: “When I started the company, people who had my interests at heart warned me that there would be no market for a company like this. ‘Who on earth is looking for knowledge about linguistics?’ But I never doubted for a second that there was a need for it. I certainly am proud that we are now doing a good job of locating and satisfying that demand. We are celebrating our fifth anniversary this year, and I have not had a moment of regrets.”