When deciding what to study you undoubtedly read a lot of information about your study programme. Leiden University employs various systems to provide information about programmes and courses and to facilitate communication between lecturers and students.

If you had something important to write down in ancient times, you would usually write in Greek in the eastern Mediterranean. University lecturer Joanne Stolk has been awarded an ERC grant to explore the kinds of spelling mistakes that were made in these scripts. And, more importantly, what improvements…

Victoria Nyst's love for sign language was sparked when she accidentally ended up at a deaf school while studying African linguistics. The university lecturer has since been awarded a Vici grant to research the history of these languages.

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…

When deciding what to study you undoubtedly read a lot of information about your study programme. Leiden University employs various systems to provide information about programmes and courses and to facilitate communication between lecturers and students.

Alumni event, Lustrum

Students of the Bachelor Honours Class 'Strategies of Resilience' are exposed to a unique educational experience. Through philosophical insights and creative exercises, participants explore what it means to be resilient. ‘I really feel like it helps you develop as a person.’

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…

The Voices of Africa platform is ten years old and has just recently won the annual popularisation prize of the Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics (LOT). High time for a chat with Jenneke van der Wal, Maarten Mous and Nina van der Vlugt about the importance of the platform and plans for the…

You can find an overview of the projects and a list of all research trainees below.

Starting as an MP during the Covid-19 pandemic and after the recent ‘role elsewhere’ debacle during the coalition talks for a new Dutch government, alumna Mariëlle is looking forward to making a real contribution in society.

The lecture halls in the Lipsius were full of curious secondary school students in January. During a special profile selection afternoon, they were introduced to the faculty and language studies. ‘I had no idea that Hebrew and Arabic were similar.’

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.

'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.

The earlier you introduce children to a language, the sooner they can be captivated by it and see that there is more than just Dutch and English. That is the basis for the language lessons for primary education that Alisa van de Haar, university lecturer of French, collaborated on. ‘Deans from different…

Conference

Researcher Max van Duijn and PhD student Bram van Dijk apply language models to stories told by children to investigate empathy. For this research, they received the Best Paper Award at the Computational Natural Language Learning Conference in Singapore.

It is one of the most talked-about subjects right now: how do we eradicate sexual harassment and violence? Alumnus Femke Eisma is the spokesperson for Mariëtte Hamer, the government commissioner tasked with tackling this persistent social problem. Eisma studied the Dutch language at Leiden. How is her…

Exchange: What and why?

Lecture

Prof. J. (Jos) Schaeken, Professor of Slavic and Baltic Languages and Cultural History, will be the interim Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Humanities from 1 March 2025. He will succeed the present Vice-Dean, Mirjam de Baar, who will complete her second term on that date.

A newly opened museum in China appears to be devoted to the origins of the Austronesian-speaking peoples, who some 5000 years ago spread from East Asia across the Pacific, seeding it with a distinctive culture and some 1200 languages. But those displays are also a statement in the long-running dispute…

Information provided by the Tax and Customs Administration is something that concerns every citizen. So it is not surprising that the Tax hotline receives around 10 million calls each year. The Benefits Affair emphasised the citizen’s perspective in communications with the Tax and Customs Administration.…

A new challenge for Felix Ameka. The senior lecturer at the Centre for Linguistics has been appointed professor by special appointment of Ethnolinguistic Vitality and Diversity in the World. ‘I am looking forward to promoting ethnolinguistic diversity and vitality.’

At faculty and study programme level there are various regulations in place to ensure that everything runs as it should. For example, there are thesis and faculty regulations, as well as rules and guidelines on assessments, exams, degree classifications and plagiarism.