Taal als sleutel tot het begrijpen van de mens.

Professor Felix Ameka and university lecturer Maria del Carmen Parafita Couta have received an NWO Open Competition grant together with Enoch Aboh (University of Amsterdam) to do research on ‘code-switching’: switching languages by multilinguals.

A linguistic test of hypotheses rooted in genetics and archaeology.

For associate professor Jenneke van der Wal, things have been good recently. After being awarded a Vici and Una Europa grant, she has now also received an Ammodo Science Award. ‘It is a nice confirmation that I am doing valuable work.’

Strategic direction of the Europe Hub lies with a Steering Committee, composed of members from several Leiden University faculties.

The application procedure is broken down into three parts.

Study information

Since April 2017 the LUCDH team has received reinforcement in the shape of two brand-new Phd candidates. They will be working on existing projects set up by Victoria Nyst and Sjef Barbiers. I have the pleasure of introducing them here.

Police investigations use wiretapped phone recordings as investigative material fairly regularly. But how do they know that the voice on the recording actually belongs to the suspect? PhD student Laura Smorenburg is trying to answer that question.

Where does Dutch come from? Newly appointed Professor Alwin Kloekhorst looks for an answer to that question in millennia-old languages from Anatolia, the Asian part of present-day Turkey. 'A new interpretation in one of the Anatolian languages can have consequences for dozens of other 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.

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.

The specialisation in Modern Languages explores the structure, acquisition, history and use of five languages.

The scientists at Babylab Leiden ensure that important knowledge is gathered about how babies learn to understand the world around them. Meet our Babylab Team and get to know our researchers!

With the support of the Foundation for Refugee Students UAF, Russia expert Oshank Hashemi, a cum laude graduate of Leiden University, has won the Peter Baehr Prize 2016.

Three Leiden students will be sharing their knowledge of history while playing video games. The livestreams are part of the ‘Streaming the Past’ project and will be available on the popular streaming platform Twitch. The first livestream will be on Thursday 20 May.

The second and final volume of this co-authored study has just been published by J.B. Metzler. This second monograph explores the history of the concept of barbarism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The AAM-LR project aims at building a demonstrator of a web service that will help filed researchers to annotate audio- and video-recordings.

Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL) is a reputable institute in the field of linguistics, offering excellent research and education opportunities covering a broad range of languages of the world.

Bringing together a globally representative team of scholars, this Handbook provides a comprehensive overview of comparative syntax, the study of universal and variable properties of the structure of building blocks in natural language.

Lecture, Leiden-Birmingham Lectures

Innovation through repetition. That is how university lecturer Jurriaan Witteman describes his research on the automatic processing of angry voices in the brain. The original research was conducted 20 years ago, but, with an NWO grant, Witteman is now going to see if those results are accurate.

Workshop Series

Syntacticians study how words combine into larger units (phrases and sentences) in human languages and how the combinatorial possibilities determine word order and grammatical relations between parts of a sentence.

What is your preferred career path? Would you like to teach? Do you enjoy doing research? Or would you prefer a job that involves writing and editing? You will find that your Linguistics degree is a perfect preparation for the career of your choice.

If you’ve graduated from the programme and you want to further your academic education you can continue with a master’s programme. It will earn you the title of Master of Arts (MA) and significantly increase your chances of finding a position at academic level.

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.

PhD defence

Endangered languages can survive if they are taught properly to new speakers, such as people with a migrant background. This is what Professor by Special Appointment Felix Ameka will say in his inaugural lecture on 30 September. Dutch people can do their bit by being less ‘polite’ to people whose mother…

Terms used by literary critics in characterizing the style of novels are often impressionistic (‘baroque’, ‘austere’, ‘vivid’, ‘cerebral’ etc.). Foundations for such evaluations are usually not provided. A scientific way of studying and explaining style is lacking in present day Dutch Studies. Suzanne…

What categories exist in the languages of pastoralists? Do these semantic concepts reflect universal or languagespecific tendencies? What (environment? culture?) governs the similarities (or the differences) attested crosslinguistically in cattle colour systems?

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

The Centre for Digital Humanities is pleased to announce that we are searching for two PhD Candidates who will carry out research within the Centre for Digital Humanities and the Leiden Centre of Data Science.

Knowledge and culture subproject 2:

Schuurman examines how Russia is escalating its covert operations against European countries.