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

The research master’s programme in Linguistics at Leiden University combines leading expertise with a flexible programme format.

A linguistic prehistory of the Tarim Basin in Northwest China

A thorough description of the relationships among languages and their social environment in a given context, reflecting an ecological perspective, involves attention to the agency of local actors, and the policies, discourse, and ideologies that surround them.

This project investigates language choice and language use among Swiss mercenaries in the VOC and in the Dutch Colonial Army.

The Leiden HANDS!Lab for Sign Languages and Deaf Studies hosts research activities in the area of sign language linguistics and Deaf studies, with a focus on Africa. In addition to various research projects, we have our Deaf studies lecture Series in International Sign and offer various regular and…

LUCL is pleased to announce that two Vrije Competitie Grants have been awarded to LUCL researchers. Prof.dr. Lisa Cheng and dr. Jenny Doetjes have been awarded a grant for their project 'Understanding questions'. Prof.dr. Michael Kemper (UvA) and prof.dr. Jos Schaeken have been awarded a grant for the…

Study information, Online Experience

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

Across cultures, parents help their children master the social and linguistic codes needed in adult life. Recent research on language socialization found important cross-cultural differences, pointing out the need for more diversity for a full understanding of this process.

Are you thinking about studying Linguistics Research MA? Learn more and watch the introduction video.

The policies relating to language pursued by European monarchies and states have been widely studied, but far less attention has been given to their linguistic and cultural policies in territories outside their own borders.

What can languages spoken in the Lesser Sunda Islands today tell us about the histories of its various population groups?

Knowledge and culture subproject 1:

In the master’s programme in Dutch Language, Culture and Society at Leiden University you will study the language and culture of the Netherlands from the Dutch Golden Age – the time of Rembrandt and Vondel – until today’s dynamic and muliticultural society.

From Sunday 11 till Tuesday 20 June 2023, NVIC organizes a new edition of the TAFL course. This intensive, interactive course is developed for (future) teachers of Arabic. It addresses both the practical aspects of teaching Arabic as a foreign language as well as the underlying linguistic and cognitive…

From Sunday 8 till Tuesday 17 January 2023, NVIC organizes a new edition of the TAFL course. This intensive, interactive course is developed for (future) teachers of Arabic. It addresses both the practical aspects of teaching Arabic as a foreign language as well as the underlying linguistic and cognitive…

Psycholinguistic research

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

From ca. 1540 to 1600, thousands fled the war-stricken Southern Low Countries to the British Isles, Germany, and the Northern Low Countries. Research on this displacement crisis, central to the formation of the Netherlands and Belgium, reflects 21st-century debates on migration and language: language…

Lexicographical description of Greek; production of Greek-Dutch dictionary

Reconstructing language history and prehistory in the context of the Indo-European language family.

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…

LUCL member prof. dr. Holger Gzella has been elected as member of the Academia Europaea (The Academy of Europe).

Describing a new language for the first time is an exciting and challenging intellectual experience.

By drawing on the personal experiences of contributors based in different institutions and countries, the articles in this special issue provide a fairly broad overview of ethics practices and concerns in different localities (though not globally, as we had originally hoped), showing, as one student…

Across cultures, parents help their children master the social and linguistic codes needed in adult life. Recent research on language socialization found important cross-cultural differences, pointing out the need for more diversity for a full understanding of this process. Deaf communities form…

This study explores the role of linguistic data in the reconstruction of Dolgan (pre)history by analyzing contact-induced changes and using them to infer information about the nature of the contact settings in which they occurred.

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.

Almost all languages of Europe and of a large part of western Asia belong to a single language family, which is called Indo-European, and which includes modern languages like English, Dutch, Russian, Farsi, but also ancient ones like Ancient Greek, Latin, Hittite and Sanskrit.

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

On December 5th, Matthias Pache succesfully defended his doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Matthias on this great result.

The Academic Language Centre Leiden offers Arabic language courses at various levels, an intensive summer course and tailor-made Japanese language training. The courses are practical in nature: focusing on the use of the language. More information can be found here >

In this research project child language phonology is studied from the perspective of a psycholinguistic speech-production model and this model is in turn studied from the perspective of developmental phonology.

This PhD project investigates what the universal and variable morphosyntactic properties of linguistic expressions of otherness are and how they can be modelled theoretically.

This collaborative research group (CRG) facilitates the synergies of researchers engaged with African languages and documentation of texts conducted in East Africa, paying particular attention to ‘endangered archives’ and ‘endangered languages’.

The Latin language is a descendant of the widespread Indo-European family of languages. Recent ancient genetic studies have helped shed light on the likelihood that the Indo-European languages spread into a Europe that had already been populated by farmers for thousands of years.

The goal of the MODOMA-project is to create a computer model of language acquisition.

This project creates a comprehensive audiovisual documentation of the Sanye language, the sociolinguistic situation, and cultural practices of the Sanye (Dahalo) community in coastal Kenya.

Conference

Fokelien Kootstra defended her thesis on 23 April 2019

Languages of The Hague is a collection of columns on languages and language which were published between 2016 and 2018 in the weekly newspaper Den Haag Centraal.

Taught from primary school to the university level – where new courses on the globalization of the Arabic writing system have cropped up (Abdallah 2014) – the Arabic script, with all its orthographic peculiarities and multiple facets, continues to shape languages other than Arabic, their communities…