The topic of Historical Linguistics and Philology at LUCL is language change in its broadest sense.

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 study of language in change.

The aim of the project is to unravel the genetic and contact relations between the indigenous languages of Mesoamerica (Mexico and western Central America) and the Middle Andes region (Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia), as part of a larger endeavor to understand the historical process of the peopling of the Americas…

This thesis investigates the historical development of Japanese pitch accent.

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

The history of sign languages of deaf people is severely understudied. The historical linguistics of sign languages offers a fundamentally new perspective on the history of human languages. This project addresses the dearth of knowledge about historical sign language linguistics through a large-scale…

How do sign languages change and spread over time, and how is this influenced by their transmission history?

Linguistic research on a unique collection of Dutch letters allowed us to gain access to the every-day language of people from various walks of life. Private letters by men, women and even children have been elaborately explored in the Letters as Loot researchprogramme, initiated and directed by prof.…

The project aims at highlighting and strengthening Dutch research into the diversity of the world’s languages from a historic and a cognitive perspective.

Fokelien Kootstra defended her thesis on 23 April 2019

The Dutch prefix ge- in historical perspective gives first of all a general account of the development of the word formation processes involving ge- in which special attention is paid to the participial ge-.

The project Going Dutch investigates why the link between being or becoming Dutch, and knowledge of Standard Dutch is so often taken for granted in public discourse, by diving into its historical roots.

This project aims to revisit the ways in which religious minorities in the Middle East participated in, contributed to, and opposed the Arab nationalism of the post-war years, when the British and French ruled the region via the Mandates. Research question: How did religious minorities in the Middle…

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.

When researching languages in historical context, our goal is to understand the nature of linguistic variation in the past, and explain the extent to which the socio-cultural context of bygone times contributed to shaping linguistic variation and change.

The research programme Descriptive and Comparative Linguistics brings together LUCL researchers who focus mainly on descriptive and comparative linguistics.

The Disticha Catonis by Catenaccio of Anagni. A text in vernacular from Latium (late 13th - early 14th century)

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

Covering all seven countries on the isthmus, this volume presents the first collection of original linguistic studies on Central American Spanish varieties, which have long been neglected in Hispanic Linguistics.

The main goal of this project is to answer the question: how did Dutch acquire its own, distinctive linguistic characteristics?

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

In this study, the formation of the Tocharian subjunctive is described, its use and meaning are analysed and its origins are investigated.

This thesis discusses the development in Proto–Indo–European, Latin and Romance of a word–formation pattern which the most adequate terminology in use dubs ‘verbal government compounds with a governing first member’; I use the shorthand ‘pickpocket compounds’.

On the 16th of February, Yunus Sulistyono successfully defended a doctoral thesis. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Yunus on this achievement!

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.

On the 16th of February 2022 Mr. Yunus Sulistyono successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

Computational linguistics uses computational methods to help answer linguistics questions across a variety of topics.

Theoretical linguistics seeks to understand the underlying principles of the nature of human language.

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

In this theme you will be supplied with a firm background in the core of current computational linguistics and a solid comprehension of its neighboring fields.

The goal of the field of Applied Linguistics is to apply the findings and the techniques from research in linguistics to solve practical language-related problems in society.

There is not a day without language: we use it to read, to write, to communicate. But do you ever wonder how you learned to speak your own language as a child? And how, as an adult, do you learn new languages? Linguistics has the answer to those questions. In the BA Linguistics at Leiden University…

The one-year master’s in Linguistics is concerned with the knowledge, structure and use of language, studied from a wide range of perspectives. It trains students to systematically identify, describe and analyse language phenomena and to apply this knowledge to a specific area of interest.

LIAS researchers working in the field of linguistics hold dual appointments in LIAS and the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL).

Applying linguistics research to solve practical language-related problems in society.

Are you thinking about studying Linguistics? Learn more and watch the programme presentation.

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