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.

The purpose of this programme is to join knowledge and insights from linguistics, literary analysis, and rhetoric, for the purpose of developing a set of methods for the stylistic investigation of any type of text in Dutch.

What is the population size/structure and distribution of tiger and leopard inside the Bardia National Park (BNP) compared with the population outside? What is the movement and home range and conflict pattern in time and space of tigers and leopards inside the BNP compared with outside? What constitutes…

In the early modern period women played a prominent role in crime. At times they even made up half of all defendants. Female criminality was a typically urban phenomenon. Why do we find so many women before the Dutch criminal courts?

A linguistic prehistory of the Tarim Basin in Northwest China

Design of a Linguistic System for Interstellar Communication Based on Logic

Does the political context (e.g., democracy vs. authoritarianism) influence what makes people perceive authorities as legitimate?

Lecture, Comparative Indo-European Linguistics (CIEL) Seminars

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

This dissertation presents a grammar of Khwarshi, a Nakh-Daghestanian language.

Linguists Alwin Kloekhorst and Alexander Lubotsky from Leiden University made a great discovery this summer. They deciphered a few dozen inscriptions on pot shards found in Daskyleion (North-West Turkey) as Phrygian and Lydian, and thus proved the presence of the Phrygians and Lydians in that area.

On 1 December 2020, Bernadette Muscat defended her thesis 'Insolvency Close-out Netting: A comparative study of English, French and US laws in a global perspective'. The doctoral research was supervised by Prof. M. Haentjens and Prof. B. Wessels.

The largest international conference on English historical linguistics is coming to Leiden. From 7 June to 11 June 2021, the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL) organises the International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL-21). Due to Covid measures, the conference takes…

This project investigates properties of quantity expressions across languages from the perspective of how quantity is represented in the human brain.

Starting September 1st, philosopher Douglas Berger will be professor of Comparative Philosophy at the Leiden Institute for Philosophy. His appointment marks a new direction for research and education in philosophy at Leiden University.

Kyra van der Moezel defended her thesis on 7 September 2016.

Een onderzoek naar de formulering, structuur, rechtshistorische aard en sociale en religieuze achtergronden van Laat-Egyptische (demotische) tempeleden, aangevuld met 70 ongepubliceerde teksten.

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

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

CompaRe’s third virtual PhD roundtable was held on 29 March 2023. In attendance were the head of the centre, staff and PhD candidates. The roundtable focused on brainstorming a wide range of questions around the research process.

On the 11th of June, Umberto Selva successfully defended his doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Umberto on this great result.

Dr. Janet Grijzenhout (Universität Konstanz) was appointed Professor English Linguistics and will be working at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL).

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…

Michaël Peyrot has been appointed professor of Comparative Indo-European Linguistics at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics with retroactive effect from 1 January. He is looking forward to passing on his love for the subject to a new generation of students.

Through a range of case studies spanning the post-Cold War period in Iraq, Moldova and Serbia, this book studies asymmetric conflicts where warring sides exhibit vast power differentials.

In this dissertation, a corpus of 595 seventeenth-century letters (mainly private ones) written between 1664 and 1672 is examined from a sociolinguistic perspective.

With the rise of AI, interest in computational linguistics and language models has taken flight. But machines are far from being able to go it alone. In her inaugural lecture, Professor Carole Tiberius will stress the importance of research on word combinations. ‘We know a great deal but there is a…

The main goal of this project is to answer the question: how did Dutch acquire its own, distinctive linguistic characteristics?

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

For his PhD project, computer scientist Manolis Fragkiadakis is developing a tool that can compare videos of sign language corpora. This would make it possible to detect differences between sign languages and prevent translation errors. Ultimately, the tool could be used to compare sign languages from…

On the 12th of November, Xander Vertegaal successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Xander on this achievement!

On the 1st of November, Andrew Wigman successfully defended a doctoral thesis. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Andrew on this achievement!

Grammatical gender is famously the most puzzling of the grammatical categories. We have a solid typology of gender systems, yet exciting and unexpected patterns keep turning up which defy easy classification and straightforward analysis. Some of these question, stretch or threaten to cross the outer…

This project aims at investigating the syntactic role of focus in ellipsis across languages.

This book presents the first comprehensive description of Tafi, one of the fourteen Ghana-Togo Mountain (GTM) languages, spoken by approximately 4,400 people in the southeastern part of Ghana. The description consists of thirteen chapters and is based on a corpus gathered during two fieldwork periods…

On 1 August, Egbert Fortuin has been appointed Professor of Russian Language and Linguistics. After a five-year term as vice-dean of the Faculty Board, he is eager to fully devote himself to the study programme. His appointment can therefore be summarised in three words: 'I am back'.

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.

ChatGPT, translation machines and bots: for Carole Tiberius, they are a piece of cake. On 1 January, she was appointed professor of Computational Linguistics. 'There ae two elements to the field: computer science and linguistics.'