On February 20th, Gulnaz Sibgatullina succesfully defended her doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Gulnaz on this great result.

This PhD project mainly investigates in what way (i.e., serial or parallel mode or other mode) the parser processes the Mandarin Chinese. In addition, are there any specific linguistic features governing the decoding of Mandarin Chinese that are different from other languages? Are there any processing…

In this project, the hypothesis that language contact crucially impacts the development of spatial grammar and phonology is investigated.

This page contains all relevant information for lecturers teaching in the Astronomy bachelor's and/or master's curriculum at Leiden University.

This thesis investigates the connection between tonal realization and tone change (tone sandhi) in Wenzhou Chinese, and whether and how such a connection is conditioned by prosodic structure and focus marking.

The Humanities Faculty Teaching Award has been won by Olja Karmanova. The Russian lecturer was presented with the award during the opening of the faculty year.

Descriptions of different languages help us understand what speakers of different languages share worldwide. At the same time, having descriptions of languages available can also change local education and open our eyes to cultural and linguistic diversity. But what if a language has not yet been (fully)…

When alumnus Jonathan Katzman started his master's programme in Russian and Eurasian Studies, he didn't foresee how useful those skills would be in the near future. Now, he manages a refugee centre for Ukrainians who have fled their war-torn country.

The 10th edition of the World Congress of African Linguists (WOCAL), hosted by Leiden University, will be held online from 7 – 12 June. Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL) researchers give us an insight into how important and special this event actually is.

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

In this dissertation a large corpus of letter signs and texts gathered during fieldwork in Niger, and to a lesser extent Mali and Burkina Faso is used to show the graphemic diversity of the traditional script of the Tuaregs, tifinagh, and to analyze the orthographic system.

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

The projects of nine researchers at Leiden University have received funding through the new NWO Science Diplomacy Fund. The Fund is for scientific activities that will improve relations between the Netherlands and other countries.

The 10th edition of the World Congress of African Linguists (WOCAL), hosted by Leiden University, will be held online from 7 – 12 June. Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL) researchers give us an insight into how important and special this event actually is.

On the 16th of December, Yachan Liang successfully defended a doctoral thesis. Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Yachan on this achievement!

Interested in Area Studies? Then Leiden is the place to be! Join our Online Area Studies Week from 2-5 June to find out more. From Africa to Brasil and from Korea to Russia, Leiden covers all areas and fields, both in language, literature, history, politics and socio-economics. Join our live Q&As!

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.

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

The Leiden Summer School in Language and Linguistics is visited every year by many scholars worldwide. Four of the 120 participants of the 7th Summer School in 2012, share their view of Leiden.

This thesis discusses the constructions relevant to Object Shift from the intonational perspective, by presenting experimental data from all the Scandinavian languages.

Professor Jenny Doetjes has received an NWO grant to research the cross-linguistic properties of quantity expressions and our brain's influence on language.

Lecture

In QS’s World University Rankings of 2016, Leiden University’s History and Linguistics programme rank #19 and #28, respectively. This makes the History programme the best of its kind in the Netherlands, and Linguistics the second best.

This study investigates the perception and production of emotional prosody by native and non-native listeners and speakers, i.e. Chinese and Dutch listeners and speakers, including Dutch L2 learners of Chinese.

This PhD project investigates what the universal and variable morphosyntactic properties of linguistic expressions of otherness are and how they can be modelled theoretically.

‘If it rains later, then I’ll take the car.’ In order to reason, we use sentences containing ‘if’ every single day. But how does that work exactly in the Dutch language? Alex Reuneker wrote his 628 page dissertation on the subject. Ceremony on 26 January.

How did Scottish speakers sound hundreds of years ago? University lecturer Mo Gordon thinks the answer to that question can be found in church archives. 'It can be a boost to your identity to know the history of your language.'

General

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:

What can languages spoken in the Lesser Sunda Islands today tell us about the histories of its various population groups?

On March 16th, students from all over the world visited Leiden's Humanities Faculty to explore their options during the Master's Open Day. 'Leiden is a beautiful city, I feel like I could definitely study here.'

Since criticising the war in Ukraine, Russian author and cardiologist Maxim Osipov has fled Russia. Come September, he will be Leiden University’s writer in residence and teach a course on Russian literature.

First set up in 2015, the Language Learner Corpus (LLC) project collected language data of over 150 language students. We have now launched new communicative tasks to collect longitudinal data of language learners at Leiden University.

In the new video series 'The World of Linguistics', alumni and researchers talk about their passion for their field. Professor of African Linguistics Maarten Mous explains the importance of hearing your language at school.

This dissertation aims at discussing the nature and the linguistic factors assumed responsible for speech intelligibility problems of Sudanese learners of English.

This PhD project investigates how grammatical features and lexical elaboration in Fulfulde Juguureere reflect aspects of cattle culture.