This project, South American population history revisited: multidisciplinary perspectives on the Upper Amazon (SAPPHIRE), investigates population dynamics in western South America on the basis of traces in the geographical, genetic, archaeological, ethnological, and linguistic record.

The BOCA project explores new forms of communicating academic knowledge as a way to strengthen the connection between the university and society.

A European project should help reinvigorate Latin teaching in secondary schools. 'By focusing on citizenship, we want to show that Latin is relevant to discussions about citizenship and migration.'

Making extensive use of primary source materials this study contributes to existing scholarship in the field of eighteenth-century grammars and grammarians by providing an in-depth study of Ash’s Grammatical Institutes and its influence on other popular grammars for children.

The book on Turkey. A Modern History written by Professor Erik-Jan Zürcher, Professor of Turkish Studies, is now available in nine different languages. Arabic and Polish versions have now been published.

Always taking the same route to work, going for that one dish in restaurants and going on the same holiday each summer: this may ring a bell for those who don’t like uncertainty. Researchers are now discovering that this aversion affects how we understand the world.

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This study presents the first systematic investigation and detailed theoretical analysis of the temporal interpretations of sentences with bare (aspectually unmarked) predicates in Mandarin.

Hekmat Dirbas defended his thesis on 14 February 2017

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…

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…

How does language work and how do we learn a language? The more we know about language, the better we can understand how people interpret the world in words. Roberta D'Alessandro carries out research on the architecture of language. There is now a dossier about her work online.

SuperCode: Sustainability PER AI-driven CO-DEsign

In November, Leiden organized a book presentation to celebrate the first Dutch translation of the collected works of the twentieth-century poet W.H. Auden. A poetry translation contest added lustre to the occasion. There were no fewer than three winners.

The Choose a Language Day was created to make high school students enthusiastic about choosing a linguistic profile and further education. Third-years were able to learn about different language studies at the Faculty of Humanities.

Which features characterize speakers’ voices, and how are these features determined by what a speaker is saying?

This dissertation presents an in-depth study of the clause-typing system in Ecuadorian Siona.

During Leiden City of Science 2022, Janet Grijzenhout and Hannah De Mulder will put multilingualism in the spotlight by organising multilingual storytelling afternoons. They hope to show parents that raising children multilingually is achievable as well as beneficial.

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.

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…

This research cluster aims to analyse and interpret the formation and transmission of Graeco-Roman culture by exploring the relationships between cultural products (texts, objects, practices) and their societal and historical contexts.

The project Advancing The European Multilingual Experience (AThEME) studied multilingualism in Europe by incorporating and combining linguistic, cognitive and sociological perspectives.

During the Latin American Studies Master's programme you will focus on key social, political, linguistic and cultural developments which are currently shaping the complex reality of Latin America.

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

When we read a text, we think we know who wrote it, but in the early modern period, manuscript production was often a collaborative or ‘socialised’ enterprise involving secretaries and scribes who physically wrote what the author dictated.

On the 13th of February, Matthew Sung successfully defended a doctoral thesis. Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Matthew on this achievement!

This project focuses on a striking parallelism between two macro-groups of languages: southern Italian dialects and the so-called split-ergative languages, like Basque, Georgian, Dyirbal, Hindi/Urdu.

During the past year online meetings and lectures have become a firm feature of university life. One of the highlights of the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics’ online activities has been the online seminar series ‘Language policy and practices in the Global North and South’ organised by guest…

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.’

The Disticha Catonis by Catenaccio of Anagni. A text in vernacular from Latium (late 13th - early 14th century)

Conference, Workshop

WORLDING AMERICA researches how ‘play’ has been a key force in the past and present process of creating America as a coherent and hegemonic ‘world,’ from 1503 to the present.

The NWO-funded Vidi project “American foreign policy and liberalism” challenges the idea that the United States has created and sustained a “liberal international order” since World War II. It instead explores the ways in which illiberal ideologies – such as those underpinning racial hierarchy at home…

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…

Suzan Verberne has been appointed professor of Natural Language Processing at the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS) from 1 October. Verberne has been at LIACS since 2017 as group leader of the Text Mining and Retrieval group.

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

Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL) has a longstanding tradition in research in the world’s languages and features unique linguistic expertise. At LUCL, we help develop interdisciplinary approaches to linguistic phenomena by facilitating the interaction between data-driven and theory-driven…

On 1 August, Egbert Fortuin has been appointed Professor of Russian Language and Linguistics. After a five-year term as vice-dean of the Faculty Board, he is eager to fully devote himself to the study programme. His appointment can therefore be summarised in three words: 'I am back'.

Workshop & exhibition

On the 25th of October, Suze Anja Verkade successfully defended a doctoral thesis. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Suze Anja on this achievement!

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.

Building a lively Humanities Campus with renewed and sustainable buildings surrounded by a green outdoor space.

In this region researchers at LUCL have specific expertise in studying Austronesian and Papuan languages. China is another important region where Leiden linguists conduct research.

Semantics and pragmatics are united in the study of linguistic meaning.

From Los Angeles to Tokyo, Urban Sociolinguistics is a sociolinguistic study of twelve urban settings around the world.

This book challenges the predominance of mainstream sociolinguistic theories by focusing on lesser known sociolinguistic systems.