On December 12th, Andreas Krogull succesfully defended his doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Andreas on this great result.

On February 20th, Gulnaz Sibgatullina succesfully defended her doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Gulnaz on this great result.

In the Bachelor Honours Class ‘The Noble Art and Tricky Business of Translation’, Honours students learn about the tricky business of translation. To gain hands-on experience, students had to translate a poem for the seminar on poetry. For some translators-to-be, one language was simply not enough.

In ancient Greece and Rome, nighttime encompassed a distinctive array of cultural values that went far beyond the inversion of daytime. Night was a mythological figure, a locus of specialized knowledge, a socially significant semantic space in various literary genres, and a setting for unique experi…

The book Uitdagend gedifferentieerd vakonderwijs bij Janssen, Hulshof and Van Veen describes a 'generative toolkit' for adapting education by teachers.

This PhD project investigates how automatic sign language recognition technology can be further developed to analyse static images and textual descriptions of signs.

This PhD project investigates how automatic sign language recognition technology can be further developed to analyse static images and textual descriptions of signs.

A project on phonology, phonetics, and the space between them.

Barbarism: from the 18th century to the present.

This project employs a systematic experimental approach to examine the interaction of these two hitherto independent lines of research (tone sandhi and focus realization) in six dialects of Chinese, which lie on a continuum between dialects with dense tonal distributions and sparser distributions. In…

A linguistic test of hypotheses rooted in genetics and archaeology.

This book contextualises case studies across a wide variety of languages and cultures, crystallising key interrelationships between linguistic standardisation and prescriptivism, and between ideas and practices. It focuses on different traditions of standardisation and prescription throughout the world…

This study offers a comprehensive but balanced grammatical analysis of Ik (Icetod), Northeast Uganda’s last thriving Kuliak language.

Lecture

On the 24th of October, Nurenzia Yannuar successfully defended her doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Nurenzia on this achievement.

The project

This dissertation provides a grammatical description of the Awjila language, a small Berber language spoken in the Libyan oasis of Awjila.

On the 6th of November, Niels Schoubben successfully defended a doctoral thesis. Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Niels on this achievement!

Dissertation

Alumnus Peter Burger – along with his colleague Alexander Pleijter – is the face of fact-checking in the Netherlands. ‘My degree led straight to this.’

This study documents and translates the Saa (Zapotec) cultural heritage of the Bene’ Ya’a/En’ne I’ya peoples, the Zapotec inhabitants of the Sierra Norte of Oaxaca.

The impact of war extends beyond destroyed buildings and torn families. In bilingual Ukraine, the ongoing war with Russia is a major driver for increasingly discarding the Russian language. What does this mean for the position of Russian in Ukraine?

What is the effect of a dynamic training in children’s inductive reasoning skills and how is it related to children’s school performances and language development.

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…

A new publication that brings together perspectives on language contact phenomena across temporal and spatial dimensions.

Thijs Porck, teacher at English Language and Culture, has won the faculty teaching prize. He was lauded for his enthousiasm, his creative ways of teaching, and his commitment to his students.

Aetiologies seem to gratify the human desire to understand the origin of a phenomenon. However, as this book demonstrates, aetiologies do not exclusively explore origins.

Nobody is better qualified to tell you what it is like to work at Leiden University than the employees themselves. Watch the videos and meet your future colleagues. They will be happy to share their experiences with you.

The Swahili coast has a long-standing history of transoceanic Islamic connections dating back to the 25th century. Yet, print, has changed the world – not only ours. This project unravels unique forms and archives of intellectual history emerging from within South-South connections. In East Africa Indian…

What evaluative languages (errors, mistakes, vices, etc.) did book reviewers employ? To what extent and on what occasions did they invoke early modern vices? And to what extent did this differ across fields or change over the course of the century?

If idioms employed in codes of conduct could be as idiosyncratic as examples suggest, then to what extent did early modern language of vice, too, persist in this genre?

When we read a text, we think we know who wrote it, but in the early modern period, manuscript production was often a collaborative or ‘socialised’ enterprise involving secretaries and scribes who physically wrote what the author dictated.

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

Professor Roberta D’Alessandro, Chair of Italian Language and Culture at the Leiden University, has been awarded one of Italy’s highest honors: she is now a Knight of the Order of the Star of Italy (Cavaliere dell'Ordine della Stella d'Italia). D’Alessandro was presented with the honor on June 2, the…

This PhD project investigates how language models can be used to extract structured knowledge from text in a way that is accurate, robust, and applicable to real-world use cases.

Online presentation

De lichtheid van literatuur: Engagement in de multiculturele samenleving (The Lightness of Literature: Engagement in the Multicultural Society) is a plea for the social relevance of literature. The book delves into an age-old debate about literature and social engagement, which has recently been reinvigorated…

The lecture halls in the Lipsius were full of curious secondary school students in January. During a special profile selection afternoon, they were introduced to the faculty and language studies. ‘I had no idea that Hebrew and Arabic were similar.’