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.

Author and political scientist Mounir Samuel has spent recent years delving into the many ways that language can exclude people and bring them together.

Where does Dutch come from? Newly appointed Professor Alwin Kloekhorst looks for an answer to that question in millennia-old languages from Anatolia, the Asian part of present-day Turkey. 'A new interpretation in one of the Anatolian languages can have consequences for dozens of other languages.'

According to Nivja de Jong, second language acquisition is 'the most fascinating subject in linguistics'. As a recently appointed professor of Second Language Acquisition and Pedagogy, she studies the question of how best to teach people a new language.

On Wednesday, 21 February, a diverse group of students, staff, and representatives from 21 embassies gathered in The Hague for International Mother Language Day. Under the banner of 'a bit of fun and many serious topics,' language took centre stage.

This project proposes an integrated and comparative study on the syntactic, semantic, prosodic and processing aspects of in-situ wh-questions, taking the Grammar-parser correspondence hypothesis (Phillips 1996, 2003) as a guiding principle.

The earlier you introduce children to a language, the sooner they can be captivated by it and see that there is more than just Dutch and English. That is the basis for the language lessons for primary education that Alisa van de Haar, university lecturer of French, collaborated on. ‘Deans from different…

The Leadership Crossing Boundaries project gathers stake holders and organisations around three leadership themes. Please refer to the Dutch project page for the full description.

In a conversation, you provide all sorts of information to the listener. For example, you can indicate that you're certain about something, or that you heard it through someone else. Associate Professor Jenneke van der Wal has been awarded a Vici grant to investigate whether the way people do this is…

The authors aim to provide insight into the way in which frontline officials in teams employ leadership behaviour aimed at creating public value.

In this article, Ben S. Kuipers and Joanne Murphy review recent critiques of leadership theory and practice.

In this article, Ben de Jong, research fellow at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs, examines the relationship between double agents and their handlers.

Where did species survive the cold cycles of the current Ice Age?

HERLING (Research Lab for the Study of Heritage Languages of the Netherlands) is a new centre that aims to bridge the gap between scientific research and language communities.

Deze week sluiten we het academisch jaar af met verschillende FGGA-studenten, waarin zij hun zomer- en toekomstplannen vertellen, maar ook terugblikken op het afgelopen jaar: ‘Ik vond het ontzettend prettig om weer terug te komen naar de fijne sfeer op Wijnhaven.’

Flitsinterview met alumnus Kees van der Staaij: ik ben en blijf een jurist in hart en nieren

Like spoken languages, sign languages evolve organically and do not always have the same origin. This produces different ways of communication and annotation. Manolis Fragkiadakis wrote his PhD thesis on this.

Nancy Kula has been Professor of African Linguistics since 1 February. Now is a good time to hear more about her field of expertise and academic interests.

The new Language Learning Resource Centre was launched today at Leiden University. The LLRC is an initiative to unite all language teaching professionals working at Leiden University, and allow them to share their ideas and resources.

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

In 2014 Russia entered Ukraine and occupied Crimea, and about two and a half years ago it began a large-scale invasion. For Ukraine, it’s a war. But Russia calls it a ‘special military operation’. Word choices of this kind affect how people look at issues. A Dutch Research Council (NWO) project led…

Language can be a time machine: we can learn from ancient texts how our ancestors interacted with the world around them. But can language also teach us something about people whose language has been lost? PhD candidate Anthony Jakob investigated whether the languages of prehistoric populations left…

From video glasses for the deaf to protecting endangered languages. The Taalmuseum's new exhibition in the hall of the University's former library demonstrates how language research contributes to societal issues such as health care and disappearing cultures. The exhibition is open from 14 September…

Computer scientist Tessa Verhoef received a Best Paper Award during the ‘ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility’. The paper emphasised the need for interdisciplinary research in sign language processing. The authors state that linguists and computer scientists should collaborate with…

Leraar worden in het voortgezet onderwijs? Bekijk dan deze video.

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.

In this research project child language phonology is studied from the perspective of a psycholinguistic speech-production model and this model is in turn studied from the perspective of developmental phonology.

The University of Bologna organizes a Summer School in Classical Languages, offering intensive courses in Latin and/or Greek (20 June – 23 July 2022). The deadline for applications is: 10 June 2022.

The Trojan War plays an important role in Greek mythology. But there is much more to Troy than mythology. The exhibition ‘Troy. City. Homer. Turkey’ can be viewed from 7 December to 5 May 2013. Leiden linguist Alwin Kloekhorst wrote an article for the exhibition catalogue on the language of Troy.

These are our lecturers (in alphabetical order) for the 2024 Summer School in Languages and Linguistics.

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.

A fascinating description of a global language, A Grammar of Mandarin by Jeroen Wiedenhof combines broad perspectives with illuminating depth.

Our language is adapted to the context in which we humans communicate. But computers ‘think’ differently. What would a language be like whose structure was optimally adjusted for use by humans and machines? Tessa Verhoef is trying to find the answer.

Our language is adapted to the context in which we humans communicate. But computers ‘think’ differently. What is the optimal form of a language for human-machine communication? Tessa Verhoef is trying to find the answer.

When Daan van Esch, master’s student in Chinese Studies, travelled through China last summer, he noticed that he often did not understand what the inhabitants of the different villages and cities were talking about. There turned out to be huge differences within the language. He decided to map this…

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