Children have the right to play and relax. Games, social media and video platforms are attractive new ways to do that. However, hardly any online games are designed specifically for children, nor do they factor in children's rights.

Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade is a Professor emeritus of English Sociohistorical Linguistics at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics.

Hilde Gunnink is a linguist specialized in the languages of Southern Africa. Her research focuses on documenting the synchronic structures of African languages, how these developed and changed over time, and what this can tell us about the human past.

Niels Schoubben is a postdoctoral researcher in the ERC project “The Silk Road Language Web” (PI: Prof. dr. Michaël Peyrot). As a linguist-cum-philologist, he studies the written remains of extinct Central Asian languages in order to uncover words and grammatical patterns borrowed from one ancient language…

Language is omnipresent: when you talk, app or meet in Teams. Understanding how we communicate with one another and what communication does to us is essential. In her inaugural lecture, Nivja de Jong will call to redress the balance between the sciences and the humanities.

Kate Bellamy is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre for Linguistics. Her research focuses on P’urhepecha, a language isolate spoken in Michoacán, Mexico. She is particularly interested in its lexical semantics and morphological composition, as well as how it is used – and varies – in language contact…

Marc Buijnsters is a Lecturer at the Leiden University Institute for Area Studies.

Tijmen Pronk is Assistant Professor and Director of Education at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics.

Lisa Cheng is Professor of General Linguistics at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics. Her research interests centre upon comparative syntax, and the interactions between syntax and semantics, syntax and prosody, as well as syntax and processing. She is a co-founder of the Leiden Institute…

Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen is Associate professor at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society.

Paz Gonzalez Gonzalez is a University Lecturer at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics.

Alwin Kloekhorst is professor of Anatolian Linguistics within the Comparative Indo-European Linguistics section at LUCL. His research focuses of the Indo-European language of Ancient Anatolia (Hittite, Luwian, Lydian, Lycian, Carian, etc.) and the genealogical position of this Anatolian branch within…

Marian Klamer is Director PhD programs and Professor of Austronesian and Papuan Linguistics at the Centre for Linguistics. She works on the description and comparison of smaller, under-described Austronesian and Papuan languages in Indonesia, and she studies the history and culture of the populations…

Dr. Mahmood Yenkimaleki is a guest researcher in LUCL at Leiden University, The Netherlands.

Many of the language rules we use today were formulated in the 17th and 18th centuries. In a dual track at the universities of Leiden and Brussels, PhD candidate Eline Lismont investigated why some rules became successful while other rules were quickly forgotten.

Lecture, Sign Languages & Deaf People

What does it sound like when you create your own words in Chichewa? Can you decipher hieroglyphs after just one workshop? Visitors found answers to these and many other questions during the first edition of the Evening of Languages, held in the brand-new Herta Mohr Building. With a sold-out programme,…

Victoria Nyst's love for sign language was sparked when she accidentally ended up at a deaf school while studying African linguistics. The university lecturer has since been awarded a Vici grant to research the history of these languages.

Suzan Verberne is professor of Natural Language Processing (NLP) at the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science at Leiden University and a member of the interdisciplinary research programme Society, Artificial Intelligence and Life Sciences (SAILS).

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…

Yuchen Lian defended her thesis on AI and language evolution at Leiden University.

The Academic Language Centre (ATC) is one of the cornerstones of Leiden University. Director Gea Hakker explains how this organisation is providing quality (online) language courses and meeting new demands.

Rik van Gijn was appointed professor of Ethnolinguistic Vitality and Diversity in the World from 1 December 2024. He is keen to use the position to set up research on language vitality. ‘People almost never give up their mother tongue entirely voluntarily.’

In accordance with the Faculty Strategic Plan, the thematic page on Languages and Cultures of the World has been launched. It provides an overview of the university's expertise in the field of Languages and Cultures. This theme is one of the four core areas that position the expertise of the Faculty…

Paul van Els is a University Lecturer at the Leiden University Institute for Area Studies.