On 1 August, Egbert Fortuin has been appointed Professor of Russian Language and Linguistics. After a five-year term as vice-dean of the Faculty Board, he is eager to fully devote himself to the study programme. His appointment can therefore be summarised in three words: 'I am back'.

In the Russian and Eurasian Studies master's programme our experts devote attention to the most recent developments, currently the war in Ukraine. Several courses will provide context and background about this war.

Are you thinking about studying Russian and Eurasian Studies? Learn more and watch the introduction video.

The impact of war extends beyond destroyed buildings and torn families. In bilingual Ukraine, the ongoing war with Russia is a major driver for increasingly discarding the Russian language. What does this mean for the position of Russian in Ukraine?

This dissertation provides a thorough review of the words belonging to the oldest layer of Germanic loanwords in Proto-Slavic and answers the question of how these words were adapted to the Proto-Slavic accentual system.

This project explores how Muslim authorities and writers use Russian to transmit Islamic contents, and whether this leads to a specific

According to Russian propaganda Ukrainians are Nazis and people from the West are Satanists. Egbert Fortuin thinks we should take this propaganda seriously.

These courses address all language skills: speaking, writing, listening and reading.

On the 2nd of July, Axel Palmér successfully defended a doctoral thesis. Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Axel on this achievement!

Discover history and present. With it's eventful history and politics, Russia is a country with a large influence on Europe and the world. In the Dutch-taught Bachelor's programme Russian Studies you will learn everything about the culture, language and politics of the largest country in the world and…

The topic of Historical Linguistics and Philology at LUCL is language change in its broadest sense.

Reconstructing language history and prehistory in the context of the Indo-European language family.

The Academic Language Centre Leiden offers Russian language courses at various levels and tailor-made Russian language courses. The courses are practical in nature: focusing on the use of the language. More information can be found here >

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

The study of language in change.

Applying linguistics research to solve practical language-related problems in society.

Documenting and describing languages of the world.

This dissertation investigates the interaction of aspect and subjectivity in modal constructions.

On 18 December 2019, Mikhail Antonov defended his thesis 'Formalism, Realism and Conservatism in Russian Law'. The doctoral research was supervised by Prof. W.B. Simons.

How were the Russians, under early modern conditions, able to incorporate this distant, undeveloped and, because frequent nomadic attacks, dangerous territory? And what role did the Kolyvan-Voskresensk plants play in this process?

Almost all languages of Europe and of a large part of western Asia belong to a single language family, which is called Indo-European, and which includes modern languages like English, Dutch, Russian, Farsi, but also ancient ones like Ancient Greek, Latin, Hittite and Sanskrit.

When literature, cultural aspects, and data-driven language learning meet in a classroom.

The Leiden Summer School in Languages and Linguistics offers a varied program of specialised courses in Descriptive linguistics, in Chinese, Germanic, Indo-European, Indian, Iranian, Semitic languages and linguistics, as well as a number of introductory linguistic courses.

A synchronic description of the endangered Slovene dialect spoken in the Gailtal valley in Carinthia, Austria.

Theoretical linguistics seeks to understand the underlying principles of the nature of human language.

Computational linguistics uses computational methods to help answer linguistics questions across a variety of topics.

The goal of the field of Applied Linguistics is to apply the findings and the techniques from research in linguistics to solve practical language-related problems in society.

In this theme you will be supplied with a firm background in the core of current computational linguistics and a solid comprehension of its neighboring fields.

There is not a day without language: we use it to read, to write, to communicate. But do you ever wonder how you learned to speak your own language as a child? And how, as an adult, do you learn new languages? Linguistics has the answer to those questions. In the BA Linguistics at Leiden University…

The one-year master’s in Linguistics is concerned with the knowledge, structure and use of language, studied from a wide range of perspectives. It trains students to systematically identify, describe and analyse language phenomena and to apply this knowledge to a specific area of interest.

This research is driven by the necessity to investigate the subject of performing instrumental works by Russian post-minimalist composers, and to explore possibilities of incorporating the spiritual ideas that informed those works in a concert practice.

Prof. J. (Jos) Schaeken, Professor of Slavic and Baltic Languages and Cultural History, will be the interim Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Humanities from 1 March 2025. He will succeed the present Vice-Dean, Mirjam de Baar, who will complete her second term on that date.

LIAS researchers working in the field of linguistics hold dual appointments in LIAS and the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL).

The Master's programme in Russian and Eurasian Studies offers you the opportunity to develop specialised knowledge of this region. The programme provides you with a qualification which is recognised by organisations around the world, and offers excellent preparation for a diverse range of careers.

Are you thinking about studying Linguistics? Learn more and watch the programme presentation.

This thesis discusses the development in Proto–Indo–European, Latin and Romance of a word–formation pattern which the most adequate terminology in use dubs ‘verbal government compounds with a governing first member’; I use the shorthand ‘pickpocket compounds’.

Are you thinking about studying Linguistics: Translation? Learn more and watch the introduction videos.

Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL) is one of seven institutes housed within the Faculty of Humanities.

Studying the underlying principles of the nature of language.

How do we process language and speech? How do we integrate information at different levels – intonation, sentence structure, meaning, tone, words, sounds - and how does information at one level interact with information at another level?

From 2 to 5 September 2015, Leiden served as the stage for one of the world’s largest linguistics conferences: the Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE) 2015 Annual Meeting. Marianne Mithun, a professor at University of California, Santa Barbara and outgoing president of the SLE, is not surprised that…

This proposed research uses ego-documents from visual artists that were not intended for publication to reassess the scholarly debate on the demise of the Russian Avant-garde aesthetic in the twenties and early thirties of the 20th century.

Chinese Linguistics at Leiden University offers you an excellent opportunity to benefit from our long-standing expertise in Chinese linguistics

In the one-year Linguistics specialisation programme you will be able to focus on a specific thematic or disciplinary route, reflecting the linguistics expertise present at Leiden University.