In June the Final Festival took place, the closing event of the 'Social Science Lab'. New participants of Honours College Science and Society presented their solution for a current social problem.

Compare human social behaviour at a country level and you will find differences. Japan has the highest score whereas the Netherlands is just above average. This is what psychologist Niels van Doesem discovered in research with an international team of 64 colleagues in 31 industrialised countries. Their…

Area studies is an approach to knowledge that starts from the study of places in the human world from antiquity to the present, through the relevant source languages, with central regard for issues of positionality.

Humanities are needed to make sense of social issues. Watch or listen to the stories of our experts who tell about their research and the impact on society. Get to know the world at Humanities!

This PhD project investigates the distribution and interpretation of quantity expressions in relation to the mass/count distinction cross-linguistically.

When you apply for admission, you’ll be asked to submit several documents.

Conference

Study of human cultures using computational approaches

Lecture

Lucien van Beek studied Comparative Indo-European Linguistics at Leiden University, focusing on Ancient Greek. As of February 2015, Van Beek will be project manager at Ineke Sluiter’s Greek-Dutch dictionary project.

One Lecture about Immigrant Integration in the EU and its Member State at the Institute of European Studies at George Washington University, one class in a course on Immigration and Integration at Georgetown University, and a lot of judging in the international rounds of the Phillip C. Jessup International…

Leiden University won five prizes at the 10th edition of the IBA International Criminal Court (ICC) Moot Court Competition – English edition of 2023, including Best Regional Team of Europe.

A new special issue on translation and the cultural Cold War sheds light on the understudied and yet important role of translation in cultural transfer.

A 5 million euros grant from the Dutch Research Agenda allows Anouk de Koning and co-applicants Femke Kaulingfreks and Maartje van der Woude to study social interventions in eight Dutch cities in an innovative and interdisciplinary way.

That's just learning parrot-fashion. This was the argument with which the proposal to establish a language lab at Leiden University was rejected in 1962. But six years later, the language lab was launched. And now the Academic Language Lab is celebrating its 50-year anniversary.

Moving to a different city as a student can be a daunting prospect, let alone to a different country. Each year, many students come to Leiden, and many find a home away from home thanks to the Humanities Master’s Buddy Programme. Kathleen Burke and Victor Jarzargaray experienced it first-hand. “It’s…

During the event 'Fout?' by De Jonge Akademie, Ellen de Bruijn held a lecture about the social context of making mistakes and the psychological elements of learning from it.

Experimental research

Knowledge and culture subproject 4:

Monday 26 September, 2016 saw the first confrontation between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Expectations were high – not only about the content of the debate, but also about how the two presidential candidates would behave, and how this might influence their campaigns. We asked three researchers…

Organised jointly by the Europa Institute, Leiden University and the Lisbon Centre for Research in Public Law, University of Lisbon on 31 May 2021.

In 2024, many of our students and staff won great prizes and secured important research grants.

Could policies aimed at preventing radicalisation undermine the very trust and social cohesion they aim to strengthen?

The decades around 1800 constitute the seminal period of European nationalism. The lin­guistic corollary of this was the rise of standard language ideology, from Finland to Spain, and from Iceland to the Habsburg Empire. Amidst these international events, the case of Dutch in the Netherlands offers…

This dissertation provides a detailed description of the interaction between verb semantics and the two grammatical voice categories in the Vedic Sanskrit of the Rigveda.

This is the first comprehensive commentary on a section of Xenophon's Anabasis in English for almost a century.

This book brings together phonologists working in different areas to explore key questions relating to phonological primitives, the basic building blocks that are at the heart of phonological structure and over which phonological computations are carried out.

Sociopragmatics is a rapidly growing field and this is the first ever handbook dedicated to this exciting area of study.

On the 18th of June, Abel Warries successfully defended a doctoral thesis. Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Abel on this achievement!

Like any language, the natural sign languages of deaf communities differ from each other in their grammars and lexicons. A growing number of studies indicates that sign languages make use of the gestures of hearing speakers to build linguistic structure. This implies that variation and similarities…

This work provides a typologically oriented description of clause linkage strategies in Ket, a highly endangered language spoken in Central Siberia. It is now the only surviving member of the Yeniseian language family with the last remaining speakers residing in the north of Russia’s Krasnoyarsk pro…

Speech Prosody is the biennial meeting of the Speech Prosody Special Interest Group (SProSIG) of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA).

Learn new ways to analyse and study cultures and languages and provides insight into how digital methods and artificial intelligence (AI) are changing our personal lives and societies in the minor Digital Humanities and Artificial Intelligence.

Ce livre est une étude pionnière portant sur l’analyse conceptuelle et la traductibilité des termes de maladie dioula jusqu’ici non abordées par les recherches antérieures. Le Dioula est une langue mandé parlée au Burkina Faso. L’étude présente les représentations de la santé, de la maladie et du corps…

Find out how to apply for Modern Languages at Leiden University by following our step-by step guide.

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