She received her doctoral degree from Bonn in 1969, with a dissertation on Latin deverbal nouns and their Romance counterparts.

She became an assistant professor first in Bonn and then at the University of Cologne (in a department headed by Hans Dieter Bork), and started working on Seychelles Creole, a language with mostly French-derived vocabulary and a restructured grammatical system.

Bollée is best known for her work on the history of the French-based creole languages of the Indian Ocean and of the Caribbean.

[3] She also worked on the related Réunion Creole language (Bollee 2013),[4] as well as its historical documentation (Bollée 2008).

Bollée has also developed a theory of creole language development that does not involve an intermediate pidgin stage (Bollée 1977b), and has worked extensively on the history of the creole languages of the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean.