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.

As a graduate of the Faculty of Humanities, there are unlimited possibilities. Do you want to know more about the sectors and jobs Humanities' graduates end up? Read their stories below!

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…

In this dissertation, the types of context Dutch speakers need to interpret the poly-interpretable word ergens ‘somewhere/anywhere’ are studied.

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.

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This subproject argues for a close and forensic reconstruction of financial flows to and from Soviet Central Asian republics in the postwar period.

This project envisions a broad evaluation of 20th century models of human development over the life course (ontogenesis, human constitution), including socialist and capitalist conceptions across both Eastern and Western Europe.

On the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the magna carta of civil aviation, the Convention on International Civil Aviation (Chicago Convention 1944), Professor Steven Truxal has written a leading piece for the European Civil Aviation Conference: The Chicago system: a steadfast legal blueprint for…

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

The International Space University is proud to announce that the 31st annual Space Studies Program (SSP) session will convene in the Netherlands during the summer of 2018.

Information obtained from Czech intelligence authorities has shown that politicians from several European countries, including the Netherlands, are involved in a Russian bribery scandal. Wim Voermans, Professor of Constitutional Law, comments on this in Dutch newspaper ‘NRC’.

The Military Information and Security Service (MIVD) prevented a Russian hacker attack on the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in The Hague. Scientists Paul Abels, Willemijn Aerts, Constant Hijzen and Sergei Boeke of the Institute of Security and Global Affairs responded to…

The Summer School in Languages and Linguistics at Leiden University has been a yearly highlight since 2006.

Chapter by Fabio Cristiano and Emilio Distretti for the volume The Aesthetics and Politics of the Online Self, edited by Donatella Della Ratta, Geert Lovink, Teresa Numerico, and Peter Sarram for Palgrave Macmillan.

On Monday 31 October the Europa Instituut had a special guest lecture by not one, but sixteen leading Russian Human Right Defenders. The Leiden Law School was very happy to host the Russian delegation, at the initiative of the Dutch Consulate General in St. Petersburg.

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.

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

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…

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 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 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 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 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.

Presentations and report!

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.

Your time at Leiden is about more than just studying. Some of your best experiences will stem from being a part of our lively and diverse student community, as well as from life in the beautiful city of Leiden.

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.