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

This project investigates the influence that Arabic (esp. dialectal Arabic) has had on the Berber languages of Northern Africa.

The present study comprises a classification and analysis of the syntax of the non-verbal clause in Qumran Hebrew, i.e. the linguistic variety (or varieties) found in the so-called Dead Sea Scrolls. The corpus consists of the non-biblical texts written in Hebrew; biblical texts and texts written in…

Stylianos Irakleous defended his thesis on 6 February 2020

This study examines the mutual intelligibility between all 225 pairs of 15 Chinese dialects, in two main branches, i.e., six Mandarin dialects and nine non-Mandarin (Southern) dialects.

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…

On the 23rd of September, George Saad successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates George on this achievement!

Platform for research about heritage languages spoken in the Netherlands

A synchronic description of the endangered Slovene dialect spoken in the Gailtal valley in Carinthia, Austria.

This study proposes a theory for the encoding of specificity and definiteness in the Chinese nominal based on Cantonese, Mandarin and Wenzhou data.

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

Collaborative linguistic research on indigenous languages of Ecuador: description, documentation & materials

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.

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 dissertation aims at discussing the nature and the linguistic factors assumed responsible for speech intelligibility problems of Sudanese learners of English.

The goal is to develop educational materials for Dâw, Hupd’äh, and Nadëb Indigenous peoples (Naduhup family; Middle and Upper Rio Negro; Brazilian Amazon). In order to achieve this, first of all, the fieldwork data collected during a collaborative project among anthropologists and linguists (2017-2020)…

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…

The research programme Formal Theoretical and Experimental Linguistics brings together LUCL researchers who focus mainly on formal theoretical and experimental linguistics.

This study analyses the prehistory of a northeastern Siberian population, the Sakha, from both a molecular-genetic and a linguistic perspective.

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.

There are over 7,000 languages in the world and over half of the world’s population is bilingual. But how do all these people use their language? And how do these languages differ from one another? Under the slogan of ‘Interconnecting linguistic diversity,’ the researchers from the Leiden University…

Like any language, the natural sign languages (henceforth: SLs) of deaf communities differ from each other in their grammars and lexicons. A growing number of studies indicates that SLs make use of the gestures of hearing speakers to build linguistic structure. This implies that variation and similarities…

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…

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.

This thesis presents a thorough survey of the central aspects of the phonology of Shaoxing Chinese from a synchronic perspective and on the basis of recent theoretical phonological developments, with the secondary goal of casting some light on current issues in Modern Chinese (Mandarin).

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

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

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

Documenting and describing languages of the world.

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

Which features characterize speakers’ voices, and how are these features determined by what a speaker is saying?

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…

In the specialisation in Modern Languages you will explore the structure, acquisition, history and use of one or more of these five languages in depth: Chinese, English, French, German and/or Italian.

Are you thinking about studying Linguistics: Translation? Learn more and watch the introduction videos.

The ultimate aim of the project is to find out whether there are such things as

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

Studying the underlying principles of the nature of language.

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

This study presents the first systematic investigation and detailed theoretical analysis of the temporal interpretations of sentences with bare (aspectually unmarked) predicates in Mandarin.

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.

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.

How did common people write in the late eighteenth century? Little is yet known on this topic, since our knowledge is mainly based on printed texts written by a small part of the (male) elite population. This dissertation – written from a sociolinguistic point of view – gives us new insights into late-…

This dissertation presents a description of Sandawe, a Khoisan language spoken by approximately 60 000 speakers in Dodoma Region, Tanzania.

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…