Literature, Language, and Multiculturalism in Scandinavia and the Low Countries presents a ground-breaking comparative approach to the study of multicultural literature.

This dissertation reports on the requirements for the design and development of teacher assessments, and examines the possibility of developing an assessment procedure that complies with the formulated requirements.

This project focuses on two Mayan languages in contact: Awakateko and K’iche’. With the aim to create a database to be accessible to researchers, students, and indigenous activists interested in Mayan languages, this project will train Mayan speakers on transcription, translation, and analysis of…

Currently the focus of the project is the development of a tool that utilizes dimensionality reduction techniques in order to analyze and interpret the lexical and phonological variation between different sign languages. Additionally, the application of deep learning techniques for the extraction of…

On October 9th, Peter Alexander Kerkhof succesfully defended his doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Peter Alexander on this great result.

Studying languages enables you to unearth a lot of valuable information about humans: it reveals our history and explains cultural differences and it even illustrates the process of learning new information. The University is sharing its knowledge of and passion for languages in various new ways, including…

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

The English language and culture study programme also exists in the form of a part-time programme.

Beauty is a central concept in the Italian cultural imagination throughout its history and in virtually all its manifestations. It particularly permeates the domains that have governed the construction of Italian identity: literature and language.

On the 10th of November, Sara Petrollino succesfully defended her PhD-thesis and graduated. LUCL congratulates Sara on this great result.

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.

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.

Very generally speaking, this study aims at questioning and re-defining the mind-body epistemic problem within contemporary dance and art culture.

The general objective of this thesis is to determine a typology of verbal derivation in Ethiopian Afro-asiatic languages.

This project examines the intriguing relationship between Greek literary criticism and Latin literature in Rome (first centuries BC and AD).

This book offers a linguistic anthropological analysis of multilingualism among the Matsigenka, Quechua, and Spanish languages on the coffee frontier of Southern Peru, set against the backdrop of economic transformation and deforestation in the world’s last great forest.

This research cluster aims to analyse and interpret the formation and transmission of Graeco-Roman culture by exploring the relationships between cultural products (texts, objects, practices) and their societal and historical contexts.

On the 30th of June, Richard L. Boutwell successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Richard on this achievement!

The AAM-LR project aims at building a demonstrator of a web service that will help filed researchers to annotate audio- and video-recordings.

On the 12th of October, Fatemeh Tabassi Mofrad successfully defended a doctoral thesis. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Fatemeh on this achievement!

The current project aims to revive the idea that sound inventories are structured according to a small set of universal principles by applying insights from current phonological theory and by making use of modern database technologies and data assessing methodologies.

Lecture, LUCL Colloquium - Series '24/'25

Lecture, Descriptive Linguistics Seminars

Professor Jenny Doetjes at Leiden University researches similarities and differences in languages, specifically in the area of numerals and quantifiers. Her research provides insight into language patterns, bu also in the working of the human brain. Inaugural lecture on 26 January.

The BOCA project explores new forms of communicating academic knowledge as a way to strengthen the connection between the university and society.

PhD defence

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

Until recently the Congo’s isolated Boa community had never read a single letter in their own language: quite simply, there was no alphabet to describe the language. A crowdfunding campaign by guest staff member Gerrit de Wit has changed that. He plans to use the rest of the money to work with a Congolese…

On 5 October, Katherine Filesia defended the thesis 'Speaking the same language: the introduction of the Anglo-American trust into the Dutch legal system'. The doctoral research was supervised by Pim Huijgen and Frans Sonneveldt.

The project

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…

On the 9th of April, Manolis Fragkiadakis successfully defended a doctoral thesis. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Manolis on this achievement!

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

Language research generates a wealth of information about people: from our history and cultural differences to the way we learn. Leiden University shares its knowledge and passion for this topic via de MOOC on ‘Miracles of Human Languages’ and the web dossier on Language Diversity.

Dr Jenny Doetjes was appointed Professor of Semantics and Language Variation in February. During her professorship Dr. Doetjes wishes to focus on charting linguistic patterns between languages that, at first glance, seem to have little to do with each other.

The decades around 1800 constitute the seminal period of European nationalism. The lin­guistic corollary of this was the rise of standard language ideology, from Finland to Spain, and from Iceland to the Habsburg Empire. Amidst these international events, the case of Dutch in the Netherlands offers…

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.

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.