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.

On the 27th of June, Timothy Mac Hadjah successfully defended a doctoral thesis. Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Timothy on this achievement!

In the Netherlands approximately 130 out of 700 secondary schools offer a bilingual stream. However, research about CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) is limited. With her dissertation Evelyn van Kampen (PhD student at ICLON) wants to contribute to the understanding of the nature and range…

On the 6th of July, Anthony Jakob successfully defended a doctoral thesis. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Anthony on this achievement!

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

There is no human society that does not employ a rich and diverse language. This course introduces you to linguistics, featuring interviews with well-known linguists and with speakers of many different languages. Join us to explore the miracles of human language!

This project aims at describing the Khoisan languages !Ora (Korana/Griqua) and !Ui of South Africa.

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.

The Leiden HANDS!Lab for Sign Languages and Deaf Studies hosts research activities in the area of sign language linguistics and Deaf studies, with a focus on Africa. In addition to various research projects, we have our Deaf studies lecture Series in International Sign and offer various regular and…

On the 27th of February, Marta Morgado successfully defended a doctoral thesis. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Marta on this achievement!

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

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

For the annual Week of Classics, Dr Marike van Aerde and her team made a documentary about their research project Routes of Exchange, Roots of Connectivity. In the film the team touches upon the interactions of Greeks and Romans with the wider ancient world, ranging from the African kingdom of Aksum…

On the 12th of December, Eleanor Dutton successfully defended her doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Eleanor on this achievement.

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…

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

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.

The theme for this year’s Week of the Classics (19 to 27 March) is war in Classical Antiquity. Leiden Classics scholars are organising various activities, including the popular Know-Your-Classics Pub Quiz.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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…

By documenting lexical and morpho-syntactic patterns among P’urhepecha speakers in Mexico and the US diaspora, this project will investigate the sources of language variation. The ensuing online dialect atlas will serve as an online resource for speakers, learners and researchers of the language.

This project aims to open up the pre-Islamic linguistic history of Arabia through the systematic study of the Thamudic inscriptions within a digital humanities framework.

This thesis investigates the connection between tonal realization and tone change (tone sandhi) in Wenzhou Chinese, and whether and how such a connection is conditioned by prosodic structure and focus marking.

This 862-page monograph is a grammar of Thangmi, an endangered Tibeto-Burman language spoken in the districts of Dolakha and Sindhupalcok in central-eastern Nepal.

The faculty of Humanities scores well in the anual QS World Universities Ranking By Subject list. This year we have placed sixth in the category Classics and Ancient History.

This dissertation provides a systematic description of English and Afrikaans verbal pseudo-coordination and a formal analysis couched in the Minimalist program.

Lecture, LUCL Colloquium - Series '24/'25