Since 1990 Tjeerd de Graaf, has specialized in the phonetic aspects of ethnolinguistics. In that year he made his first fieldwork trip with a Japanese expedition to the minority peoples of Sakhalin. Since then he has contributed to various research projects with colleagues in the Russian Federation and Japan. Most of these projects were financially supported by special grants from the European Union and the Netherlands Organization of Scientific Research NWO. In 1998 he received a Doctorate Honoris Causa for this work from the University of St.Petersburg. Since 2002 he is a board member of the Foundation for Endangered Languages (Great Britain) and a research fellow at the Fryske Akademy, which co-ordinates research on the language, history and culture of Frisian, one of the lesser used languages of Europe. As a team member of the Mercator European Research Centre on Multilingualism and Language Learning he contributes to the work related to minorities in the European Union. In the first half of 2003 he spent a semester as visiting professor at the University of St.Petersburg and in 2004 and 2005 he worked as guest researcher at the Slavic Research Center of Hokkaido University (Japan).Mercator European Research Centre on Multilingualism and Language Learning c/o Fryske AkademyDoelestrjitte 8P.O.Box 54NL-8900 AB, Ljouwert / LeeuwardenThe Netherlands t: +31 (0) 50-3092218f: +31 (0) 58 213 1409e: tdegraaffryske-akademy.nlw: www.mercator-research.eu --> Endangered LanguagesSpecialties: Scientific translation work, in particular from Russian