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…

From films, video games and historical novels to Nordic folk bands, Old English from the early Middle Ages is experiencing a revival in the 21st century. Together with international colleagues, university lecturer Thijs Porck (LUCAS) made a book about the 'resurrection' of this dead language.

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.

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.

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 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.

Political scientists Tom Louwerse, Simon Otjes & Cynthia van Vonno introduce the Dutch Parliamentary Behaviour Dataset, a record of parliamentary (voting) behaviour in the Dutch Tweede Kamer (Second Chamber, House of Representatives) since 1945.

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.

From Sunday 11 till Tuesday 20 June 2023, NVIC organizes a new edition of the TAFL course. This intensive, interactive course is developed for (future) teachers of Arabic. It addresses both the practical aspects of teaching Arabic as a foreign language as well as the underlying linguistic and cognitive…

From Sunday 8 till Tuesday 17 January 2023, NVIC organizes a new edition of the TAFL course. This intensive, interactive course is developed for (future) teachers of Arabic. It addresses both the practical aspects of teaching Arabic as a foreign language as well as the underlying linguistic and cognitive…

The present project aims to provide valuable insights for the professional development of international teachers, and also for improving the quality of foreign language education.

This study explores regional variation in the use of utterance-final particles by analyzing spoken Taiwan Mandarin data recorded from spontaneous conversations.

The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL) aims to demonstrate its relevance to society by means of high-quality research, excellent education and various outreach activities. A few highlights:

Stylianos Irakleous defended his thesis on 6 February 2020

When university lecturer Martine Bruil was on exchange in Ecuador as a teenager, she fell in love with the area's ancient languages. Now, more than 20 years later, she is starting a research project on the kinship of the language Awapit with the Quechua language that was spread by the Incas.

A synchronic description of the endangered Slovene dialect spoken in the Gailtal valley in Carinthia, Austria.

Japanologist and linguist Martine Robbeets is going to use her newly acquired ERC Consolidator Grant to study the origins and spread of Trans-Eurasian languages, which include Japanese and Turkish. With it, she’s tackling one of the most controversial subjects in language history.

The next round of courses will take place from Monday, 26 September 2022 until Wednesday, 30 November 2022. In the upcoming course round, level 1, level 2, level 3 and level 4 will be offered. Classes will take place on Mondays and Wednesdays only.

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

MPs in the Netherlands are first and foremost motivated by their direct environment, i.e. the parliamentary and partisan institutions.

Although the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) harmonizes the protection of personal data across the EU as of May 2018, its open norms in combination with cultural differences between countries result in differences in the practical implementation, interpretation and enforcement of personal…

Parassign is a program to assign protein nuclei solely on the basis of pseudocontact shifts (PCS). The PCS from several paramagnetic tags are required, in order to produce several restraints per nucleus.

Simon Willmetts provides evidence for systematic policy of direct collussion between the TIme Inc. media empire and U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.

Attention to the colonial past may be increasing, but many aspects of it are still underexposed. Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant, in collaboration with, among others, Leiden researchers Anne-Marieke van der Wal-Rémy and Alicia Schrikker, therefore created a 'canon of the Dutch underexposed past', which…

The project

For two decades, language experts were certain that babies were able to learn language rules from as young as the age of seven months. However, recent research carried out by a consortium of four Dutch baby labs led by researchers from Leiden cast doubts on this certainty. We spoke to researchers Andreea…

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…

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.

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…

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.

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…

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…

If you follow the western media, you are likely to think of ‘Africa’ as the continent of origin of desperate migrants, a continent of hunger and disease and a breeding ground for international terrorism. But if you want to see the bigger picture, you should look no further than the African Studies scholars…