This dissertation presents a description of Sandawe, a Khoisan language spoken by approximately 60 000 speakers in Dodoma Region, Tanzania.

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…

This study analyses the prehistory of a northeastern Siberian population, the Sakha, from both a molecular-genetic and a linguistic perspective.

Linguist Willem Adelaar was appointed to Knight in the Order of the Dutch Lion on October 1st. On that very same day he celebrated his 43-year connection to Leiden University. Adelaar has an impressive track record in the field of indigenous, and often endangered, Amerindian languages.

The main purpose of this book is to give a description of the Cholón language as represented in the Arte de la lengua cholona (ALC), a colonial grammar written in 1748 by a Franciscan friar, named Pedro de la Mata. The ALC was transcribed by Fray Gerónimo Clota in 1772. This grammar is kept in the British…

This dissertation provides a description of the language Tadaksahak as it is spoken by the Idaksahak, a people group of about 30,000 living in the most eastern part of Mali and several isolated places in western Niger.

Good news for Linguistics alumna Anne-Mieke Thieme, who has won the thesis prize awarded by the European Federation of National Institutions for Language (EFNIL). ‘I emailed my thesis supervisor right away.’

This dissertation focuses on the overt marking of φ features encoded on perfective active auxiliaries in a group of Southern Italian dialects.

For decades, linguists have racked their brains over the question of precisely how the syntax of various languages is different. PhD candidate Martin Kroon has developed a computer system that brings us closer to finding an answer. His PhD defence is on 10 November.

This dissertation assesses the influence of British Celtic on the phonological development of English during and shortly after the Anglo-Saxon settlement period, ca. AD 450-700.

This volume provides a sample of the most recent studies on Spanish-English codeswitching both in the Caribbean and among bilinguals in the United States.

The global population speaks approximately 7,000 different languages and approximately half of the world’s population is bilingual. The unique orthographic characteristics of different languages can help us to gain insight into the seemingly simple process of transforming written to spoken words (i.e.,…

This dissertation provides a description of the phonology and morphology of Mambay, an Adamawa (Niger-Congo) language spoken by 15,000 people in Chad and Cameroon.

This dissertation focuses on the systematic vowel alternations displayed by the Proto-Germanic n-stems. The fact is, that many of these nouns now appear to have preserved the ablaut system of the Indo-European proto-language spoken some five millennia ago. In this respect, the n-stems are truly comparable…

Migration is not only reflected in DNA, but also in language. By tracing changes in language, we learn more about the lifestyle of the people that speak it. University lecturer Tijmen Pronk (40) conducts linguistic research into (pre)historical migration.

This dissertation is the first comprehensive description of Makalero, a language spoken by approximately 6,500 speakers in the Iliomar subdistrict, in the south-east of the Republic of East Timor. While previous sources considered it to be a dialect of the larger language Makasae, the present study,…

This proposal aims at the construction of a comprehensive and authoritative scientific grammar for Dutch and Frisian in the form of a virtual language institute: het Taalportaal/the Language Portal.

This dissertation contains a detailed description of the Carib language, including the most extensive dictionary of the language to date. This knowledge is based on work from earlier sources and field work which was carried out by the author over a ten-year period, particularly in Galibi, a Carib village…

This grammar provides a description of Sunwar, a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in eastern Nepal, based on data collected during twelve months of field work.

This dissertation provides a description of Makonde, a Bantu language spoken in Tanzania.

In this study Lilie Roosman describes the effects of prominence and boundary marking on the temporal and melodic structures of two regional languages of Indonesia, viz. Toba Batak, a stress language, and her native language Betawi Malay, a non-stress language.

This grammar presents an in-depth linguistic description of one Papuan Malay variety, based on fifteen hours of recordings of spontaneous narratives and conversations between Papuan Malay speakers.

The Laiseang archiving project ensures the preservation of unique records of languages in the region which have been gathered by more than two dozen linguists at, and in collaboration with Dutch universities over the last 40 years.

This thesis investigates the grammar of Gaahmg, a Nilo-Saharan, Eastern Sudanic language spoken in the Blue Nile Province of North Sudan. The comprehensive description provides an analysis of the phonology, morphology, and syntax. Ten texts of various genre are given to help illustrated the grammar…

This study proposes a theory for the encoding of specificity and definiteness in the Chinese nominal based on Cantonese, Mandarin and Wenzhou data.

This dissertation presents a grammar of Khwarshi, a Nakh-Daghestanian language.

This dissertation provides an overview of the phonological developments of the Qinghai-Gansu languages, comparing them to the reconstructed ancestral language.

This book presents an in-depth grammatical description of Kumzari, a mixed language spoken in remote villages on the Musandam Peninsula in northern Oman.

This dissertation presents the first full grammatical description of bago ts'amakkilo ('mouth of the Ts'amakko'), or simply Ts'amakko. It is a Cushitic language, spoken in Southwest Ethiopia and belongs to the Dullay cluster of Lowland East Cushitic. The number of speakers is about 10,000. The data…

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

On Saturday 16 April, secondary school pupils will once again have a chance to sink their teeth into the hardest language-related questions during the final of the Linguistics Olympiad. Professor Sasha Lubotsky and PhD student Cid Swanenvleugel are both former Olympiad winners. Now they are involved…

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

Master’s student of Linguistics Marten van der Meulen helped organise the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) Miracles of Human Language, which ran from 30 March until 11 May 2015. What was it like for a student to organise an MOOC? And what did he learn from it?

This project proposes an integrated and comparative study on the syntactic, semantic, prosodic and processing aspects of in-situ wh-questions, taking the Grammar-parser correspondence hypothesis (Phillips 1996, 2003) as a guiding principle.

Rector Magnificus Carel Stolker will retire on 8 February. If there’s one theme running through his career, it’s the links between the University and society. In this series of pre-retirement discussions, Stolker will talk one last time to people from within and without the University. In this first…

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.

Design of a Linguistic System for Interstellar Communication Based on Logic

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

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…

This project aims at describing the Khoisan languages !Ora (Korana/Griqua) and !Ui of South Africa.

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?

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…