Dr W. H. Jansen (1948) has been named Professor by Special Appointment of Interlinguistics and Esperanto in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). The chair was designated on behalf of the International Esperanto Institute Foundation (Stichting Internationaal Esperanto-Instituut).

Wim Jansen's teaching activities centre on interlinguistics (the science of artificial languages) and language acquisition in relation to Esperanto. His research until now has concentrated on the syntax and typology of Esperanto. Jansen is at present also engaged in researching loan words and loan translations from Dutch that have found their way either directly or circuitously via other languages into Esperanto. In the period to come he will expand on these activities with research into European language policy, and specifically into the possible effects that working languages or lingua francas in the EU have on the corpus and status of other languages, together with the role that language planning can play in this regard.

Jansen has degrees in aerospace engineering from the Technical University of Delft (1970) and Comparative Linguistics, with a specialisation in Basque, from Leiden University (1989). Following a career in the European Space Agency, Jansen became active as a publicist and language instructor in adult education. Among his publications are the first Basque-Dutch bilingual dictionary. Since 2002 Jansen has been Assistant Professor in Interlinguistics and Esperanto in the Department of Language and Linguistics at the UvA. At the same time, he conducted research for his PhD thesis on word order in Esperanto, which he completed at the UvA in 2007.