Using brain imaging to discover the area in the brain that recognizes emotion.

What does it sound like when you create your own words in Chichewa? Can you decipher hieroglyphs after just one workshop? Visitors found answers to these and many other questions during the first edition of the Evening of Languages, held in the brand-new Herta Mohr Building. With a sold-out programme,…

The Research Master in Linguistics is a specialised research-based programme offered at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL). It is modelled on LUCL’s unique profile of studying language diversity by means of a wide variety of theoretical and methodological approaches.

From April 2022, Professor Paul Nieuwbeerta will be working one day a week as affiliated professor for Statistics Netherlands (Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek (CBS)). He is Professor of Criminology at the Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology, Leiden University.

As a graduate of the MA Linguistics, with a specialisation in Linguistics, you will have developed a range of analytical and problem-solving skills that can be applied to many careers, in growing areas like speech technology, artificial intelligence, education, language documentation, language policy,…

How does language work and how do we learn a language? The more we know about language, the better we can understand how people interpret the world in words. Roberta D'Alessandro carries out research on the architecture of language. There is now a dossier about her work online.

Herman Paul (professor of History of the Humanities) has been elected a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). He will be officially installed on 30 September.

How do Chinese language teachers negotiate who they are as teachers when they work abroad? This dissertation offers clear, practice-oriented answers. It examines teacher identity - the everyday answer to 'What kind of teacher am I here?' - as it is reshaped through classroom interactions, institutional…

For decades, linguists have racked their brains over the question of precisely how the syntax of various languages is different. PhD candidate Martin Kroon has developed a computer system that brings us closer to finding an answer. His PhD defence is on 10 November.

Anneke Wurth, PhD candidate at ICLON, wanted to gain insight into what works well in oral language education in the school subject of Dutch in the upper years of havo and vwo. The role of feedback became central to her research.

Professor Paul Keβler, prefect of the Leiden Hortus botanicus, holds the special chair Botanical gardens and botany of South-East Asia since 1 February 2017.

The project investigates how bilingual speakers navigate lexico-syntactic features, including grammatical gender, classifier systems, and the linear order of adjectives and nouns, across Spanish and Chinese in both unilingual and bilingual contexts.

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…

These are our lecturers (in alphabetical order) for the 2025 Summer School in Languages and Linguistics.

This volume provides a sample of the most recent studies on Spanish-English codeswitching both in the Caribbean and among bilinguals in the United States.

At LUCL we study almost all aspects of a wide range of African languages. From phonology to anthropological linguistics, from theoretical syntax to urban youth languages, we study it all.

This dissertation focuses on the systematic vowel alternations displayed by the Proto-Germanic n-stems. The fact is, that many of these nouns now appear to have preserved the ablaut system of the Indo-European proto-language spoken some five millennia ago. In this respect, the n-stems are truly comparable…

Prof. Paul Wouters (CWTS) has been appointed by the US based MacArthur Foundation as one of the judges to evaluate proposals in a competition for a grant of $100 million to solve a critical social problem

Everyone can study at Leiden University, at all stages of life: as undergraduate, master or doctoral students in Leiden or The Hague, or short courses with a choice of interesting and diverse subjects. In fact, by sitting in front of a computer at home, now you also take part in free online programs…

Migration is not only reflected in DNA, but also in language. By tracing changes in language, we learn more about the lifestyle of the people that speak it. University lecturer Tijmen Pronk (40) conducts linguistic research into (pre)historical migration.

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…

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.

Brain research and statistics are advancing our understanding of language and language acquisition. Linguists are still essential, however, says Professor of Dutch Linguistics Sjef Barbiers. Inaugural lecture on 8 December.

The project investigates epistemicity: how the knowledge of the speaker and hearer can be expressed in the grammar. This shows us how speakers organise their knowledge, and whether this is influenced by the language they speak.

This dissertation contains a detailed description of the Carib language, including the most extensive dictionary of the language to date. This knowledge is based on work from earlier sources and field work which was carried out by the author over a ten-year period, particularly in Galibi, a Carib village…

This grammar provides a description of Sunwar, a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in eastern Nepal, based on data collected during twelve months of field work.

Lecture, Comparative Indo-European Linguistics (CIEL) Seminars

Before the modern nation-state became a stable, widespread phenomenon throughout northern Europe, multilingualism-the use of multiple languages in one geographical area-was common throughout the region.

The goal is to develop educational materials for Dâw, Hupd’äh, and Nadëb Indigenous peoples (Naduhup family; Middle and Upper Rio Negro; Brazilian Amazon). In order to achieve this, first of all, the fieldwork data collected during a collaborative project among anthropologists and linguists (2017-2020)…

All languages use melody in speech, primarily via rises and falls of the pitch of voice. Such pitch variation is pervasive, offering a wide spectrum of nuance to sentences – an additional layer of meaning. For example, saying “yes” with a rising pitch implies a question (rather than an affirmation).…

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…

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

In this study Lilie Roosman describes the effects of prominence and boundary marking on the temporal and melodic structures of two regional languages of Indonesia, viz. Toba Batak, a stress language, and her native language Betawi Malay, a non-stress language.

Herman Paul has received a €140,000 grant from the Thorbecke Fund (KNAW) for a project entitled “The Demands of Our Time: Epochal Thinking from 1800 to the Present.”

How can a CLIL approach, with a focus on disciplinary literacies, improve the teaching of the LLA programme’s literary component in senior TTO?

Leiden is to have a new language museum in 2015, a public institute focusing on language in all its facets and where science and social developments come together for a broad public. It won't be in a building, but at different places in the city. Dynamic, contemporary, flexible and affordable. The details…

This research cluster aims to analyse and interpret the formation and transmission of Graeco-Roman culture by exploring the relationships between cultural products (texts, objects, practices) and their societal and historical contexts.

For decades, scholars have wondered about the development and dissemination of languages around the world. What are the odds that peoples living thousands of miles apart speak varieties of Indo-European languages that are closely related? This riddle has now partly been solved thanks to an international…

Knowledge and culture subproject 4: