Frans (Camille Cornelis) Van Coetsem (April 14, 1919 – February 11, 2002) was a Belgian (Flemish) linguist. After an academic career in Flanders and the Netherlands he was appointed professor at Cornell University in 1968, and consequently he emigrated to the US, where, after a few years, he chose to become a naturalized American citizen. Life Coetsem was born on April 14, 1919, in Geraardsbergen, a small town in the southeastern part of the province of East Flanders, on the Franco-Dutch language border. His native language was the (Dutch) dialect of Geraardsbergen. At a very early age, he lost both his parents, and his aunt and uncle raised him and sent him to a French-language boarding school. After finishing high school in 1939, he attended a Nivelles "régendat" (a type of teacher training college below university level), yet another French-language school. However, he was so dissatisfied with the education that he was getting that in 1941, he ended it and switched to the Catholic University of Leuven to study Germanic philology. (At the time, "Germanic philology" included Dutch, English and German languages and literatures as well as a number of courses in philosophy and history.) Even before graduating, he had worked as an interpreter for the British armed forces during the Allied invasion of Germany. He graduated in 1946; his undergraduate thesis dealt with the sounds and the morphology of his native Geraardsbergen dialect. Less than a year later, on April 30, 1947, he married his childhood sweetheart. His Ph.D. thesis, which he defended in 1952, was also devoted to the sounds and the morphology of the Geraardsbergen dialect; his thesis supervisor was L. Grootaers. However, before he had obtained his degree, he had been hired by the Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal (WNT) as a trainee editor, which meant moving to Wassenaar, near his job in Leiden. There, he was coached by K.H. Heeroma, who also assisted him in choosing the subject of his "Aggregatie voor het Hoger Onderwijs", which he obtained in 1956. His thesis, published by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) the same year, was a significant breakthrough in the comparative study of the Germanic languages, and it established his international reputation in the field. In 1957, he was appointed successor to his supervisor L. Grootaers [†1956] at the Germanic Philology department of the Catholic University of Leuven, and he moved back to Belgium.