What does it take to truly be ‘one of us’ and what role does language play in this process? In short, what is the difference between ‘a language we understand’ and ‘our language’? This is the question Professor Terkourafi will address in her inaugural lecture on Friday 20 April.

Tonal bilinguals of two closely related Chinese dialects are amazing people. They handle two tonal systems in their mind; their two vocabularies are from closely related dialects, and they write translation equivalents with common Chinese characters. Their unique language situation makes their mind…

This research examines the social, political, and cultural forces that structure people’s responses towards accented speech, and further uses the accent as a focal point to theorize the interrelation between language and body.

In late medieval and early modern times, books, as well as the people who produced and read (or listened to) them, moved between regions, social circles, and languages with relative ease. Yet, in the multilingual Low Countries, francophone literature was both internationally mobile and firmly rooted…

Man is nature's mind-reading champion: we are better able than any other living beings to empathise with others. This comes in part from our story-telling culture, according to Max van Duijn. PhD defence 20 April.

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

Lecture

Publishing about your research is a key aspect of your career as a researcher; the majority of research publications are written in English. When applying for research funding, too, it is very important to ensure that your application is written in clear, accessible English. Maria Sherwood-Smith, Academic…

The form and content of the course are determined by your answers on the intake form and, if necessary, an intake interview.

This dissertation aims to explore how university students use mobile technology for their self-directed language learning and investigate factors influencing their self-directed learning with mobile technology.

This thesis presents a detailed description of the phonology, the tone system and the grammar of Liko, a Bantu language spoken by about 70,000 people in the northeastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It provides numerous examples.

In this research, for the first time a detailed description as well as systematic and comparative analysis of the final particle system in Chinese are provided.

What is the name of the medieval Persian poet Nezami (✞ ca. 1209) doing on the cover of an Eric Clapton rock album? Asghar Seyed Gohrab, associate professor at the Institute for Area Studies, talks about it in a new blog for the Leiden Medievalists Blog.

At LUCL, researchers have established the Leiden Hands!Lab for Sign Languages and Deaf Studies.

Interested in our GTGC programme? Read more here in other languages.

The languages of the Mbam-et-Inoubou District of the Centre Region of Cameroon have a unique position in Bantu linguistics. Being in between

This study presents a full descriptive account of the grammar of Mualang, covering the major features of phonology and morphosyntax as well as issues related to pragmatics.

To what extent does using 360 immersion to a speaking task change the elicited speech, compared to conditions with 2D presentations?

This dissertation explores the history of the language of a manuscript known as Tönnies Fonne's Russian-German Phrasebook (Pskov 1607).

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.

An in-depth history of Large Language Models—and what their ubiquity, disruption, and creativity mean from a wider sociopolitical perspective.

Lecture, LUCL Colloquium

This is a Special Issue of the peer-reviewed 'Dutch Journal of Applied Linguistics (DuJAL)’, which focuses on promoting Dutch and Belgian work in applied linguistics among an international audience, but also welcomes contributions from other countries.

On the 13th of November, Hanna Fricke successfully defended her doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Hanna on this achievement.

This thesis aims at contributing to our understanding of the semantic and prosodic properties of object foci in Greek, employing theoretical and experimental tools.

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

On the 26th of September, Cosmas Rai Amenorvi successfully defended a doctoral thesis. Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Cosmas on this achievement!

On December 18th, Viktorija Kostadinova succesfully defended her doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Viktorija on this great result.

My research addresses the function of the much-debated particle -nā in Biblical Hebrew, often translated with “please”, from the point of view of the most important ancient Bible translations (Greek, Syriac, Latin). It combines textual criticism, translation technique, discourse pragmatics, and the…

The Special Issue of the European Journal of Applied Linguistics on ‘Language Ideologies: Old Questions, New Perspectives’ aims to offer diverse insights on language ideologies with a focus on methodological and theoretical questions.

This research profile area brings together descriptive, historical and theoretical linguistics, as well as psycho- and neurolinguistics.

Leiden University has introduced the training program for the Basic Qualification in Education (BKO). This is mandatory and has been made available for (university) teachers and professors to obtain a BKO certificate, depending on the timing, scope, and duration of their employment.

In this article, the authors summarise the literature on the effects of multilevel governance on governments’ policy responses to Covid-19.

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.

On the 16th of September, Bert van Pinxteren successfully defended a doctoral thesis. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Bert on this achievement!

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

The main aim of this project is to provide a full analysis of the actual influence of French on Dutch in The Netherlands during the period of 1500 - 1900.

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…

The first of the two volumes of this co-authored study has just been published by Metzler. The study explores the history of the concept ‘barbarism’ from the 18th century to the present and illuminates its foundational role in modern European and Western identity.

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.