Studying one another’s languages and cultures fosters understanding between groups of people, which leads to more equality, along with increased economic, administrative, and cultural cooperation.

The project investigates how bilingual speakers navigate lexico-syntactic features, including grammatical gender, classifier systems, and the linear order of adjectives and nouns, across Spanish and Chinese in both unilingual and bilingual contexts.

This PhD project investigates the distribution and interpretation of quantity expressions in relation to the mass/count distinction cross-linguistically.

The project investigates epistemicity: how the knowledge of the speaker and hearer can be expressed in the grammar. This shows us how speakers organise their knowledge, and whether this is influenced by the language they speak.

This project investigates the sources of variability in prosody comprehension.

On the 19th of February, Mariana Martins successfully defended a doctoral thesis. Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Mariana on this achievement!

This PhD project investigates how nationalist ideas are expressed, shaped, and negotiated in Moroccan Malhun poetry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

All languages use melody in speech, primarily via rises and falls of the pitch of voice. Such pitch variation is pervasive, offering a wide spectrum of nuance to sentences – an additional layer of meaning. For example, saying “yes” with a rising pitch implies a question (rather than an affirmation).…

This project investigates language choice and language use among Swiss mercenaries in the VOC and in the Dutch Colonial Army.

This project investigates how inhabitants of Leiden with a migratory background experience the extent to which their language and cultural background is welcomed in Dutch society and how this affects their identity, sense of belonging, and general wellbeing.

Unlike the predominant and excessive focus on the problems of food production and food insecurity in Africa, this project views African culinary tradition as a vibrant and rich cultural heritage, intertwined with language use.

This project investigates properties of quantity expressions across languages from the perspective of how quantity is represented in the human brain.

Historical Sociolinguistics is the study of the relationship between language and society in its historical dimension. This is the first textbook to introduce this vibrant field, based on examples and case studies taken from a variety of languages.

This project investigates (1) how the strategies used in expressing epistemicity differ in their interpretation and use; (2) which strategies can combine and to what effects this leads; (3) what the expression of (various aspects of) epistemicity tell us about how the languages encode the speaker’s…

This project investigates how people choose linguistic forms like questions or statements in everyday speech.

On the 19th of November, Tingting Zheng successfully defended a doctoral thesis. Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Tingting on this achievement!

On the 16th of December, Yachan Liang successfully defended a doctoral thesis. Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Yachan on this achievement!

This PhD project investigates the forms, functions, meanings, and socio-cultural values embedded in Palenda, in order to understand how it reflects and shapes the worldview of the Muna people (Mieno Wuna) through metaphor.

This PhD project investigates the different ways in which honorific forms are used in Japanese other than to express politeness, and how different factors affect perceptions about these uses.

When and how was alphabetic writing introduced to Greece and the wider Mediterranean region?

How does Russia use propaganda and what characterises Russian propaganda in terms of language and argumentation?

This PhD project investigates the historical and sociolinguistic factors that have influenced the emergence of local sign languages in Mozambique. It examines how these factors have shaped the Deaf signing community and contributed to the development of a national sign language that incorporates borrowings…

A linguistic prehistory of the Tarim Basin in Northwest China

This PhD project investigates the impacts of recognition of sign languages on communication and instruction for deaf learners in primary schools in Uganda.

On the 6th of January, Kefan Bao successfully defended a doctoral thesis. Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Kefan on this achievement!

This special issue explores social meaning from the perspective of current theories in pragmatics.

When we read a text, we think we know who wrote it, but in the early modern period, manuscript production was often a collaborative or ‘socialised’ enterprise involving secretaries and scribes who physically wrote what the author dictated.

On the 17th of December, Jin Wang successfully defended a doctoral thesis. Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Jin on this achievement!

This project looks at the Ancient Greek language from the perspective of the ordinary writer. A large corpus of more than 60.000 Greek texts on papyrus, from private letters to petitions and contracts, offers an excellent opportunity to study the Greek language as written by non-literary writers in…

This PhD project investigates how grammatical features and lexical elaboration in Fulfulde Juguureere reflect aspects of cattle culture.

On the 16th of December, Ruixue Wu successfully defended a doctoral thesis. Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Ruixue on this achievement!

On the 13th of February, Matthew Sung successfully defended a doctoral thesis. Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Matthew on this achievement!

This PhD project investigates specific types of allusions used by Russian native speakers, namely references to classical Russian literature. The research includes the analysis of 1) how native speakers use allusions, 2) what type of discourse allusions are frequently used, and 3) how we can implement…

This project investigates how sign languages change and spread over time, and how this is influenced by their transmission history.

It is often claimed—in both scholarly and popular sources—that guide dogs for the blind are a modern innovation. But as this project demonstrates clearly, guide dogs also existed during the medieval period.

From ca. 1540 to 1600, thousands fled the war-stricken Southern Low Countries to the British Isles, Germany, and the Northern Low Countries. Research on this displacement crisis, central to the formation of the Netherlands and Belgium, reflects 21st-century debates on migration and language: language…

In the 19th century, Old English poems were claimed as cultural heritage by various non-Anglophone nations, including Scandinavians, Germans and Dutch. These competing nationalistic, cultural appropriations happened against the backdrop of a growing interest in early medieval English language and literature…

This PhD project investigates the argumentative-rhetorical strategies by which the Russian state attempts to substantiate the legitimacy of its war against Ukraine.

By documenting lexical and morpho-syntactic patterns among P’urhepecha speakers in Mexico and the US diaspora, this project will investigate the sources of language variation. The ensuing online dialect atlas will serve as an online resource for speakers, learners and researchers of the language.

This PhD project investigates what the universal and variable morphosyntactic properties of linguistic expressions of otherness are and how they can be modelled theoretically.

This project creates a comprehensive audiovisual documentation of the Sanye language, the sociolinguistic situation, and cultural practices of the Sanye (Dahalo) community in coastal Kenya.

The project focusses on how US views of the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia influenced its strategic interpretations of the region.

Since the 16th century, religious concerns have motivated the study of Old English and its speakers. In the 19th century, scholars turned to the study of Old English literature in particular to find traces of pre-Christian, ‘Germanic’ religion, as discussed in Eric G. Stanley’s seminal work The Search…

How did people across Central and Eastern Europe imagine the future during the transitions of the 1980s and 1990s? The umbrella term ‘post-communism’ does not provide an answer to this question. This project explores how writers and cultural theorists saw the potential future of their societies during…

This PhD project investigates how Russian state-aligned media frame the war in Ukraine for international audiences and how these frames travel across borders, being adopted, adapted, or challenged by foreign media and political actors.

WORLDING AMERICA researches how ‘play’ has been a key force in the past and present process of creating America as a coherent and hegemonic ‘world,’ from 1503 to the present.

This PhD project mainly investigates in what way (i.e., serial or parallel mode or other mode) the parser processes the Mandarin Chinese. In addition, are there any specific linguistic features governing the decoding of Mandarin Chinese that are different from other languages? Are there any processing…