The MA Literary Studies at Leiden University offers you a specialised qualification in one of four languages and cultures or a comparative perspective on literature and culture, with each programme offering considerable scope for individual customisation.

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

Leiden University has a leading position in research and education in the linguistics of languages around the globe, including sign languages. In recent years, digital approaches to studying spoken languages and their communities have rapidly expanded. Language technology and digital approaches relating…

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 7 October the beginners course Dutch has successfully started with a pizza kick-off.

Archaeobotanic research by prof. dr. C. Bakels and students on agriculture.

By making smart use of available data, the health and care of people can be substantially improved. Marco Spruit wants to use language and machine learning in the coming years to identify and solve the biggest care issues in the region of The Hague. He has been appointed Professor of Advanced Data Science…

Leiden University is an internationally oriented Dutch university, where we communicate with one another in both Dutch and English. To ensure that we handle this bilingual convention with due care, the Executive Board has established a set of guidelines on language policy. These guidelines set out the…

Nivja de Jong, researcher at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL) and the Leiden University Graduate School of Teaching (ICLON), has won the 2018 Best Article Award from the International Language Testing Association (ILTA) for her paper on language fluency. The award committee writes…

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?

For many deaf Ghanaians, Ghanaian Sign Language is their first language. But for more deaf signers to be able to fully participate in society, more sign language interpreters, deaf school teachers and family members need to be trained. What better way to facilitate this by means of a Ghanaian Sign Language…

Language is a little bit like owning a mobile phone. We use it all the time, but we don’t really understand how it works. Where is language located in our brain? Do all humans have language? These and many other questions will be answered by professor Marc van Oostendorp in the MOOC Miracles of Human…

That's just learning parrot-fashion. This was the argument with which the proposal to establish a language lab at Leiden University was rejected in 1962. But six years later, the language lab was launched. And now the Academic Language Lab is celebrating its 50-year anniversary.

The high number of students that we are used to in the West would never have been possible if Latin were still the language of instruction in our universities. In his PhD defence on 16 September, Bert van Pinxteren will argue that Africa could gain a lot from a similar language switch in secondary e…

This study aims to reveal how national, regional, public and private television stations in Indonesia – each in their own ways and for their own aims - represent aspects of Javaneseness.

This study describes religion in Java.

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Around seven per cent of children have difficulty learning their mother tongue because they have some form of developmental language disorder (DLD). World DLD Day on 15 October called attention to this disorder. Development psychologist Neeltje van den Bedem explains why this is important.

This dissertation provides a description of Konso, a Cushitic language spoken by about 250,000 speakers in the South-West Ethiopia.

The aim of this project is the linguistic documentation of Bakola, a Narrow Bantu language.

Five thousand years before the common era (BCE), Proto-Indo-European, the mother of many languages that are spoken today in Europe, Central Asia and South Asia, originated in eastern Europe. PhD candidate Axel Palmér has combined a 175-year-old hypothesis with new techniques to demonstrate how descendants…

This volume offers a multidisciplinary view of cutting-edge research on bilingualism in Spanish and Portuguese-speaking regions, with the aim of building a bridge between sub-fields and approaches that often find themselves isolated from one another.

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…

How would you convert Egyptian hieroglyphs into Latin script? And what is actually the correct translation of dishes on a Vietnamese menu? On Saturday 28 January, high school students from all over the Netherlands will come to Leiden to ponder a series of language-related puzzles. Their goal? To win…

Workshop

Between 1993 and 2000 the Faculty of Archaeology had a formal cooperation with the Service Régional de l’Archéologie de la Guadeloupe, Direction Regional des Affaires Culturelles (DRAC) and the then director André Delpuech. During that period surveys and excavations were carried out at a number of s…

Novel language learning activates different neural processes than was previously thought. A Leiden research team has discovered parallel but separate contributions from the hippocampus and Broca's area, the learning centre in the left hemisphere. The right hemisphere of the brain also seems to play…

Self-directed learning is more suitable for intermediate and advanced language learners than for beginners.

Professor Johan Rooryck will be examining cognition and core knowledge systems and how possession is expressed in different languages. Rooryck and fellow researchers have been awarded two NWO grants totalling 2.75 million euro to carry out two research programmes: 'Knowledge and Culture' and 'Lend me…

The Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition (LIBC) is concentrating increasingly on research into the role of the brain in language development. The institute has now set up the LIBC Language website that brings together all the information on this research.

Comparison between babies and song-birds when they are learning a non-existent language—a study of this kind has never been tried before. But this is what Claartje Levelt, Carel ten Cate (Leiden University) and Jelle Zuidema (University of Amsterdam) are attempting.

Alex Elias, alumnus of the Research Master Linguistics, has won the prestigious Jan Brouwer Thesis Award for his thesis. Elias, who is currently working as a PhD-student at UC Berkeley, wrote his thesis under supervision of prof. dr. Marian Klamer.

On 7 October, a court in Athens, Greece, convicted leaders of the far-right Golden Dawn party as directing a criminal organization. Marina Terkourafi, professor of Sociolinguistics, discusses the landmark ruling for the Leiden International Studies Blog.

Linguist Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade retired in July, but is pressing on regardless with her languages in The Hague project. An online tour of her Hague Proverbs launched recently and Tieken also has academic publications in the pipeline.

PhD defence

The presents thesis investigates the extent to which Chinese, Dutch and American speakers of English are mutually intelligible. Intelligibility of vowels, simplex consonants and consonant clusters was tested in meaningless sound sequences, as well as in words in meaningless and meaningful short sent…

Taught by top researchers from a wide range of disciplines, the MA Chinese Studies at Leiden University combines in-depth knowledge with advanced language proficiency with a year-long stay in China.

The Master’s in Asian Studies at Leiden University is your opportunity to earn a specialised qualification from one of the leading centres for Asian studies in Europe.

Leiden University’s master programme in Japanese Studies offers a unique opportunity to conduct graduate-level research on various aspects of modern and pre-modern Japan, and to spend a full academic year in Japan.

The master’s programme of Latin American Studies offered by Leiden University supports the teaching and research of the social, cultural, historical, and linguistic diversity of contemporary Latin America, a region of mind-blowing diversity and global impact.

In the Russian and Eurasian Studies master's programme our experts devote attention to the most recent developments, currently the war in Ukraine. Several courses will provide context and background about this war.

The Master’s in Korean Studies at Leiden University offers a unique opportunity to conduct graduate level research, on various aspects of pre-modern and contemporary Korea, and to spend a full academic year at a university in South Korea.

Leiden University offers ambitious students the latest knowledge and the freedom to develop their own area of expertise.

Roman philosopher and orator Marcus Tullius Cicero is still used as an intellectual example by politicians and speech writers today. But, he did not go unchallenged in his own day, as a statesman in particular. Classicist Leanne Jansen conducted research into how classical historians judged Cicero’s…

Leiden University provides ambitious students with the most recent and innovative areas of knowledge, and offers them the freedom to develop their own area of expertise.

Leiden University offers ambitious students the latest knowledge and the freedom to develop their own area of expertise.