Heiko, a native of Emlichheim, Germany, is finishing up his PhD in Germanic Linguistics at UT Austin. His areas of interest include Low German, dialectology, Dutch, historical linguistics, and teaching both German and Dutch. He is particularly interested in language preservation as he himself is a speaker of a minority language, Plattdeutsch, which is still spoken in the ‘Grafschaft Bentheim’ in Lower Saxony (northern Germany). Heiko enjoys playing the guitar, reading, swimming, and great home-cooked dinners. Beginning in Fall 2005, he will be a lecturer of German at Wake Forest University in North Carolina.
