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:

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Study information

Study information

How did nineteenth-century non-Anglophone translators and authors creatively engage with the poem Beowulf?

The prehistory of communication metaphors

'Psychologists think I’m a linguist but linguists think I’m a psychologist,' says cognitive neuroscientist Xiaochen Zheng. With the Veni grant she will be able to bring these two fields of research closer together. Read her answers to five questions.

Professor Sjef Barbiers is leaving his job as scientific director of LUCL for the position of scientific director of the Institute for the Dutch Language (INT) from 1 September.

Prof. Dr. Willem Adelaar has been elected as Honorary member of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA)

As of this October, linguist Roberta D'Alessandro is appointed as Member of the International Council for Science (ICSU) Committee on Freedom and Responsibility in the conduct of Science (CFRS).

The Academic Language Centre is part of the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL) and provides language services to students and staff of Leiden University and the Leiden University Medical Centre.

Tingting Hui started her PhD project at LUCAS in September 2015. Her promotors will be Ernst van Alphen and Yasco Horsman from the Literary Studies department.

Words originally intended to indicate space, such as ‘out’, are also regularly used to indicate cause and effect. Why does this happen? And how does it work in other languages? PhD candidate Camil Staps decided to find out.

What motivates learners in bilingual education to learn English and how can and do teaching practices contribute to that motivation?

University lecturer Alex Reuneker has won the Frans van Eemeren Prize for his paper 'Assessing classification reliability of conditionals in discourse'.

Leiden Anglicist Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade is one of the seventeen new members of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Tieken is Professor of Historical Sociolingusitics of English.

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…

The city centre of Leiden is covered in them: wall poems. When roaming around, you come across poetry written in the Latin alphabet, but also in scripts that might be more difficult to understand for the average person living in Leiden. In a new series of videos, Tijmen Pronk talks more about this.

Lecture

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…

The Dutch phrase ‘ijs en weder dienende’ (literally, ‘ice and weather serving’) is a good example of what is known as a participle clause and is perhaps one of the most unfathomable grammatical constructions in Dutch. For what (or who) is serving whom (or what)? It actually means ‘ice and weather permitting’.…

Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade has received a special award: the Order of St. Mellitus, in recognition of her services to the history of the Bishops of London.

What makes for a good team? In a series of articles on teams, Forbes referred to the work of Marina Terkourafi, professor of Sociolinguistics at Leiden University.

Since the 16th century, religious concerns have motivated the study of Old English and its speakers. In the 19th century, scholars turned to the study of Old English literature in particular to find traces of pre-Christian, ‘Germanic’ religion, as discussed in Eric G. Stanley’s seminal work The Search…

A course that concludes with a video pitch, instead of a paper or examination: Italian Language and Culture students each recorded their own knowledge clip, speaking to a wide audience about Italian cultural expressions. We asked Goran Bouaziz, Cameron-May Bosch and Katja Timmer what they thought of…

Professor Sjef Barbiers will be appointed Managing Director of the Institute for the Dutch Language (INT) with effect from 1 September 2025. He will step down as scientific director of LUCL as of that date.

Fifteen hundred years ago, the north-west of what we now call China was a jumble of peoples. How did those Indians, Khotanese and Tocharians influence each other and each other's languages? Associate professor Michaël Peyrot has been awarded an ERC grant of almost two million euros to unravel this 'web…

SAILS likes to occasionally organise workshops about topics that relate to our programme. On this page you can find more information about previous workshops.

Important dates in the Academic Language Centre calendar

Language learners in higher education increasingly conduct out-of-class self-directed learning facilitated by mobile technology. This project aims to explore how university students use mobile technology for their self-directed language learning and investigate factors that influence their self-directed…

This project will study the cultural meaning of the mythological figure of Orestes within the ancient Greek imagination, as it emerges from various literary sources from the archaic and classical periods.

This research revolves around the philosophical and linguistic elements that naturally belong to the process of learning music scores, including complex contemporary repertoire distinguished by physically decoupled notations or physical polyphonic notations.

Graduates in Humanities possess talents that are highly valued in the job market.

Research in the International Relations and European Studies Team addresses the interconnections and interdependence of contemporary global political, economic and cultural affairs from a multidisciplinary perspective rooted in the humanities.

Channi Li defended her thesis on 15 October 2019.

This book explores the links between maritime trading networks around Europe, from the Mediterranean and the Atlantic to the North and Baltic Seas.

This study focuses on the local level impacts of a highly globalised industry: the international trade in tropical timber.