This engagingly written textbook provides a unique 'hands-on' introduction to sociolinguistics, which equips readers with the tools to start their own sociolinguistic research project.

How did the Arabs manage to maintain an empire based on Islamic principles for three hundred years? Arab expert Petra Sijpesteijn and her team will be examining this question over the coming five years, focusing on the correspondence of ordinary people. The research is being funded by an ERC Consolidator…

This PhD project investigates the different uses of Mandarin

This dissertation attempts to describe the linguistic history of Hittite on the basis of a systematic etymological treatment of its entire inherited lexicon, precisely analyzing the phonological and morphological developments.

Experience, Narrative, and Criticism in Ancient Greece pursues a new approach to ancient Greek narrative beyond the taxonomies of structuralist narratologies.

This interdisciplinary research project explores several adaptive machine learning methods which can give insight into the interaction between human and machine. The ultimate goal is open and natural communication between humans and AI that should result in mutual trust, cooperation and coordination…

If you had something important to write down in ancient times, you would usually write in Greek in the eastern Mediterranean. University lecturer Joanne Stolk has been awarded an ERC grant to explore the kinds of spelling mistakes that were made in these scripts. And, more importantly, what improvements…

This book provides a grammatical sketch, glossed texts and a glossary of Tarifiyt Berber, which is the main heritage language of the Moroccan community in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany.

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Sociopragmatics is a rapidly growing field and this is the first ever handbook dedicated to this exciting area of study.

Speech Prosody 2024 includes seven special sessions. When making a submission, authors are asked to indicate whether they want their paper to be considered for a special session. You can find descriptions of each below.

To be eligible for Modern Languages at Leiden University, you must meet the following admission requirements.

Leiden University regularly confers honorary doctorates, and presents awards and prizes.

Promotor: F.S. de Boer Co-promotor: P. T. de Gouw

Nivja de Jong, researcher at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL) and the Leiden University Graduate School of Teaching (ICLON), has won the 2018 Best Article Award from the International Language Testing Association (ILTA) for her paper on language fluency. The award committee writes…

This publication aims at the analysis of the performance of a corpus of Fongbe stories that I collected in three villages in the south of Benin in 1976 and 1977. The corpus consists of 37 stories (57.000 words). The stories aim at children’s education.

Simulating human language understanding on the computer is a great challenge. A way to approach it is to represent natural language meanings in logic, and to use logical provers to determine what does and does not follow from a text. What logic is best to use and how natural language meanings are best…

Do you want to discover a language and culture that is completely different from the Netherlands?

You can ask virtual assistant Siri about the weather, but you can’t have a real conversation with it yet. You can’t refer to anything that’s been said before, or ask the system why it says what it says. Stephan Raaijmakers, Professor by Special Appointment from TNO, hopes to change this.

This project seeks to integrate scientific research and practical knowledge in the study of the mechanisms that make dialogue an effective tool for communication, teaching, and thinking.

Linguists Alwin Kloekhorst and Alexander Lubotsky from Leiden University made a great discovery this summer. They deciphered a few dozen inscriptions on pot shards found in Daskyleion (North-West Turkey) as Phrygian and Lydian, and thus proved the presence of the Phrygians and Lydians in that area.

Researchers Karène Sanchez and Sary Zananiri tell us about their research project CrossRoads, which investigates Christian communities during British Mandate Palestine (1918-1948) through cultural and linguistic lenses. The project was awarded a VIDI grant by NWO in 2017.

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

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

The Netherlands Institute in Morocco (NIMAR) is an institute of the Faculty of Humanities of Leiden University, with a nationwide remit, located in Rabat, Morocco. NIMAR has four tasks.

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While Old Germanic studies might seem dated and, regrettably, occupies a less than secure position in various academic institutions, exciting new research presented by young researchers shows that the field is still vibrant and may have a bright future. On Thursday, the 7th of April, the ‘Junius Symposium…

Currently the focus of the project is the development of a tool that utilizes dimensionality reduction techniques in order to analyze and interpret the lexical and phonological variation between different sign languages. Additionally, the application of deep learning techniques for the extraction of…

This project focuses on two Mayan languages in contact: Awakateko and K’iche’. With the aim to create a database to be accessible to researchers, students, and indigenous activists interested in Mayan languages, this project will train Mayan speakers on transcription, translation, and analysis of…

A newly opened museum in China appears to be devoted to the origins of the Austronesian-speaking peoples, who some 5000 years ago spread from East Asia across the Pacific, seeding it with a distinctive culture and some 1200 languages. But those displays are also a statement in the long-running dispute…

Ancient Greek is well-known for displaying relatively free word order. This dissertation examines word order variation in the Koine Greek of the New Testament Greek in a variety of domains: declarative clauses, questions and relative clauses. In particular, I examine the way in which word order corresponds…

Descriptive linguistics at LUCL covers documentation and descriptive analysis of lesser-studied languages as well as typological and historical comparison.

On the 23rd of March, Alessandro del Tomba successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Alessandro on this achievement!

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Information provided by the Tax and Customs Administration is something that concerns every citizen. So it is not surprising that the Tax hotline receives around 10 million calls each year. The Benefits Affair emphasised the citizen’s perspective in communications with the Tax and Customs Administration.…

It is one of the most talked-about subjects right now: how do we eradicate sexual harassment and violence? Alumnus Femke Eisma is the spokesperson for Mariëtte Hamer, the government commissioner tasked with tackling this persistent social problem. Eisma studied the Dutch language at Leiden. How is her…

This dissertation provides a formal description of the relationship between diatopic/diachronic micro-variation and phonologization through analysis of the phonetic/phonological properties of unstressed vowel reduction and vowel insertion in two Northern Italian dialects.

A linguistics journal based at Leiden University has risen to the ranks of the top-10 journals in the Humanities.

Prof. dr. Roberta D'Alessandro has written an article on the increasing difficulties that researchers encounter when they apply for a research grant in the Netherlands.

Ingrid Tieken, Professor at the English Department of Leiden University, has been awarded a Vrije Competite grant by NWO.