The Hague is the archetypal multicultural city. With a different language spoken on every street corner, this makes it a paradise for linguists such as Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade. Her book Languages of The Hague is a collection of fascinating conversations with the city’s non-native speakers.

How are social structures of gender, religion and race/ethnicity learned and embodied in practices of movement?

The purpose of this programme is to join knowledge and insights from linguistics, literary analysis, and rhetoric, for the purpose of developing a set of methods for the stylistic investigation of any type of text in Dutch.

This study looks at the diverse phonological systems found within Central Chadic, and reconstructs the phonological system of their ancestor language.

Physicist, former D66 party leader and author, mainly of children’s books, Jan Terlouw, gives three to four readings a week. Even at the age of 86 he is tireless in communicating his message: ‘We need to regain trust in one another, and we have to seek fraternity.’

Marine sponges are important members of reef ecosystems, as they play ecological roles that are essential for the health of the reef.

Sorghum (Sorghum bicolor) is a major cereal crop that millions of subsistence farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) rely on. However, the scourging impact of the root parasitic weed Striga (Striga hermonthica, a.k.a. “witch-weed”) has remained a major constraint hampering the productivity of sorghum in…

In this region researchers at LUCL have specific expertise in studying Austronesian and Papuan languages. China is another important region where Leiden linguists conduct research.

In this project, the hypothesis that language contact crucially impacts the development of spatial grammar and phonology is investigated.

Rector Magnificus Carel Stolker was presented with a 'Diamond' on 8 June in recognition of Leiden University's role as a 'shining example' of male/female diversity. 'It's a question of determination,' says Stolker, 'and that gets results. For example, we are appointing an increasing number of female…

The current study focuses on Walpole’s social network and the language as contained in the letters of the network members.

Design of a Linguistic System for Interstellar Communication Based on Logic

Lecture, SMILE - Experimental Linguistics series

Lecture, Comparative Indo-European Linguistics (CIEL) Seminars

The largest international conference on English historical linguistics is coming to Leiden. From 7 June to 11 June 2021, the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL) organises the International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL-21). Due to Covid measures, the conference takes…

Leiden University actively promotes diversity and inclusion. In the online magazine Diversity and Inclusion you can read all about the symposium, the exhibition and what the University is doing to make sure that all students and staff feel welcome at our University.

Languages spoken around the world differ vastly from  the more familiar Indo-European languages. The courses in this theme aim to introduce you to the immense linguistic diversity still found in the world today. 

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

The main goal of this project is to answer the question: how did Dutch acquire its own, distinctive linguistic characteristics?

As of 1 September, the Netherlands has a national action plan to promote diversity and inclusion in teaching and research. The plan was launched at Leiden University’s Wijnhaven building on its Campus The Hague.

What can we learn from the diverse institutional logics of smart government in East Asia to inform cross-institutional AI governance?

Grammatical gender is famously the most puzzling of the grammatical categories. We have a solid typology of gender systems, yet exciting and unexpected patterns keep turning up which defy easy classification and straightforward analysis. Some of these question, stretch or threaten to cross the outer…

This doctoral thesis elaborates Langacker’s reference-point model by applying it to lexical semantics.

How can we make sure that everyone feels welcome at our university? Read the highlights from the conference on The Making of an Inclusive Leiden University: The Do’s and Don’ts.

In this thesis, we aim to shed light on the diverse and often opposing roles of integrin α3β1 in cancer.

The general objective of this thesis is to determine a typology of verbal derivation in Ethiopian Afro-asiatic languages.

Many organisations have a biased workforce, even though diversity has so many advantages. Australian and Dutch researchers, including Leiden psychologist Romy van der Lee, have developed a solution based on a mathematical model. They published their findings in PLoS One on 28 July.

This 862-page monograph is a grammar of Thangmi, an endangered Tibeto-Burman language spoken in the districts of Dolakha and Sindhupalcok in central-eastern Nepal.

This study investigates the syntax and distribution of the two elliptical phenomena Gapping and Fragments, as well as the movements involved in ellipsis contexts in general.

This thesis is a sample-based typological study of formal and semantic patterns in terms for a selection of referring (

In this study, the formation of the Tocharian subjunctive is described, its use and meaning are analysed and its origins are investigated.

This dissertation provides an up to date description of the Indo European lexical stock of Armenian (ca. 500 entries) with systematic inclusion of unused data that are found in Armenian dialects.

This study presents the first systematic investigation and detailed theoretical analysis of the temporal interpretations of sentences with bare (aspectually unmarked) predicates in Mandarin.

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

This volume offers a multidisciplinary view of cutting-edge research on bilingualism in Spanish and Portuguese-speaking regions, with the aim of building a bridge between sub-fields and approaches that often find themselves isolated from one another.

The intake of bachelor’s students from classic immigration countries whose prior education was in the Netherlands does not reflect the growing diversity in society. This is according to data from Statistics Netherlands.

Nowadays, most Europeans speak a language belonging to the Indo-European language family. However, very different languages were spoken on our continent before the arrival of the Indo-Europeans. The EUROLITHIC project tries to find answers to the question which languages these were and where they came…

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.