Lecture, Sign Language & Deaf People

Democratic citizenship refers to the capacity and willingness of citizens to actively influence the functioning of state institutions. While considered a vital correlate of democratization and the rule of law, its largely western-oriented literature rarely studies the forms of democratic citizenship…

Professor Peter Bisschop has been awarded an ERC Advanced Grant. He will invest the 2.5 million euros in his research into puranas: ancient texts, commonly written in Sanskrit, that are up to fifteen hundred years old.

With the launch of the Albabtain Leiden University Centre for Arabic Culture, Leiden University and the AbdulAziz Saud Al-Babtain Cultural Foundation will join hands in promoting the understanding of Arabic culture. Have a look at the centre's plans for the years ahead.

Five thousand years before the common era (BCE), Proto-Indo-European, the mother of many languages that are spoken today in Europe, Central Asia and South Asia, originated in eastern Europe. PhD candidate Axel Palmér has combined a 175-year-old hypothesis with new techniques to demonstrate how descendants…

When it comes to literature, people mostly talk about what characters see or hear. Rarely is it about what they smell. That’s a shame, thinks university lecturer Jan van Dijkhuizen. He has been awarded an Open Competition grant from NWO to expand academic knowledge about scent in literature, and to…

When Daan van Esch, master’s student in Chinese Studies, travelled through China last summer, he noticed that he often did not understand what the inhabitants of the different villages and cities were talking about. There turned out to be huge differences within the language. He decided to map this…

The project

Researcher Max van Duijn and PhD student Bram van Dijk apply language models to stories told by children to investigate empathy. For this research, they received the Best Paper Award at the Computational Natural Language Learning Conference in Singapore.

Conference, Penn-Leiden Colloquium on Ancient Values XIII

Cette étude montre que le développement phonético-phonologique en fulfulde et bambara est à la foiscomparable au développement langagier dans d’autres langues du monde et influencé par les caractéristiques phonétiques et phonologiques de ces deux langues notamment au niveau de la phonotaxe.

Ruobin Han defended her thesis on 21 March 2017

Southeast Asia is a term to denote a collection of at present eleven nation-states with an enormous diversity in languages, cultures and religions. Muslims can both take a majority and a minority position.

On 21 September 2022 Arfiansyah successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

Are you a student from Indonesia, planning to study in Leiden?

Leiden University was founded in 1575 and is one of Europe’s leading international research universities. It has seven faculties in the arts, humanities and sciences, spread over locations in Leiden and The Hague. The University has over 6,700 staff members and 29,520 students. The motto of the University…

Our Permanent Representative Office of Leiden University in Indonesia is located at the compound of the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Jakarta.

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…

The aim of this project is the linguistic documentation of Bakola, a Narrow Bantu language.

The bachelor's programme in Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology goes international! From September 2019, the entire programme can be followed in English and will be accessible for students from all over the world. On 14 February 2019, the Institute of Cultural Anthropology held an inspiring…

Leiden University is an internationally oriented Dutch university, where we communicate with one another in both Dutch and English. To ensure that we handle this bilingual convention with due care, the Executive Board has established a set of guidelines on language policy. These guidelines set out the…

Humans share meaning through language. Over time, repeated interactions have shaped languages into forms that match our cognitive preferences, making them structured, expressive, easy to learn, and ultimately, meaningful.

The presents thesis investigates the extent to which Chinese, Dutch and American speakers of English are mutually intelligible. Intelligibility of vowels, simplex consonants and consonant clusters was tested in meaningless sound sequences, as well as in words in meaningless and meaningful short sent…

The illicit trade in stolen cultural property is booming. Countless works of art and antiquities will be lost if we don’t do more to stop this. This is what experts warned at a Leiden Global congress at the National Museum of Antiquities.

Language is a little bit like owning a mobile phone. We use it all the time, but we don’t really understand how it works. Where is language located in our brain? Do all humans have language? These and many other questions will be answered by professor Marc van Oostendorp in the MOOC Miracles of Human…

What is the name of the medieval Persian poet Nezami (✞ ca. 1209) doing on the cover of an Eric Clapton rock album? Asghar Seyed Gohrab, associate professor at the Institute for Area Studies, talks about it in a new blog for the Leiden Medievalists Blog.

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This dissertation provides a description of Konso, a Cushitic language spoken by about 250,000 speakers in the South-West Ethiopia.

The logic seems inescapable indeed. The bigger the population, the higher the probability it contains an Einstein. Hence, bigger populations are more likely to develop complex culture.

Around seven per cent of children have difficulty learning their mother tongue because they have some form of developmental language disorder (DLD). World DLD Day on 15 October called attention to this disorder. Development psychologist Neeltje van den Bedem explains why this is important.

Indonesia Sandwich Scholarship and academic recharching programme.

Self-directed learning is more suitable for intermediate and advanced language learners than for beginners.

A century ago, the French linguist Ferdinand de Saussure proposed that the relationship between the sound of a word and its meaning is fundamentally arbitrary. In a new study, a team of researchers from European and American research institutions, including Søren Wichmann from Leiden University Centre…

Several Spanish media paid attention to associate professor Eric Storm’s new book Nationalism.

For decades, scholars have wondered about the development and dissemination of languages around the world. What are the odds that peoples living thousands of miles apart speak varieties of Indo-European languages that are closely related? This riddle has now partly been solved thanks to an international…

In this dissertation, a corpus of 595 seventeenth-century letters (mainly private ones) written between 1664 and 1672 is examined from a sociolinguistic perspective.

Protestant missionaries have provided the earliest and most detailed sources regarding the ritual art of the Papuan peoples of the Geelvink Bay.

Anneke Wurth, PhD candidate at ICLON, wanted to gain insight into what works well in oral language education in the school subject of Dutch in the upper years of havo and vwo. The role of feedback became central to her research.

culture week fgga. from 25 to 29 May we will pay extra attention to culture. A different theme is central every day.

Now available on YouTube!

Maarten Mous, Professor of African Linguistics at Leiden University, looks back on the 50th edition of the Colloquium of African Languages and Linguistics (CALL) and explains why this birthday was a celebration like no other.

From films, video games and historical novels to Nordic folk bands, Old English from the early Middle Ages is experiencing a revival in the 21st century. Together with international colleagues, university lecturer Thijs Porck (LUCAS) made a book about the 'resurrection' of this dead language.