On the 11th of May, Jean Chavula succesfully defended her PhD-thesis and graduated. LUCL congratulates Jean on this great result.

Inaugural lecture

How do you make niche subjects interesting and accessible? Benjamin Suchard, historical linguist and researcher, seems to have created the perfect recipe, which consists of his various projects alongside his regular research, including a Twitter account and a major international film.

Across cultures, parents help their children master the social and linguistic codes needed in adult life. Recent research on language socialization found important cross-cultural differences, pointing out the need for more diversity for a full understanding of this process. Deaf communities form…

Samen met andere studenten bracht Fien Lurvink hulpgoederen naar Oekraïne en nam vluchtelingen mee terug.

There is a growing demand throughout the world for ways to understand and preserve cultural heritage. Heritage has a crucial role to play because it strengthens societies and promotes understanding among cultures. Leiden expertise in the area of heritage spans the whole world.

On this page you will find more information about the selected projects of the Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (JEDI) Fund for 2025.

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

After two years of corona restrictions, it was ‘back to normal’ in 2022. Migration, elections, the history of slavery, Russia, and Ukraine were much-discussed topics. We compiled an overview of the most-read news items and other events of the past year.

Lecture, Applied African Linguistics

As of the 1st of January 2021, Lisa Cheng, Professor of General Linguistics, will be the next Scientific Director of the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL). She tells us about LUCL and shares some of her thoughts about her upcoming role.

On the 12th of December, Ria Huijgen-Koolen successfully defended a doctoral thesis. Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Ria on this achievement!

PhD defence

The Business, Technology & Public Policy research group of the Department of Business Sciences at Leiden University focuses on investigating the dynamic interaction between 'new' technologies and various stakeholders, including consumers, employees, and businesses. Our research delves into perceptions,…

James Shires has contributed a chapter to the proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Cyber Conflict (CyCon 2021), which gathers 20 articles from the law, technology and strategy domains.

Assessing Learning in Higher Education addresses what is probably the most time-consuming part of the work of staff in higher education, and something to the complexity of which many of the recent developments in higher education have added. Getting assessment ‘right’– that is, designing and implementing…

The Intelligence and Security research group focuses on intelligence and security within the European Union. Its approach is interdisciplinary and reflects ISGA’s broad perspective, combining insights from ethics, history, law, political science, psychology, and sociology.

This book is the first comparative study of estimative intelligence and strategic surprise in a European context, complementing and testing insights from previous studies centred on the United States. It does extensive empirical analysis of open-source material and interviews in relation to three cases…

Van Vark defended her dissertation 'Separation and immersion: the changing role of the armed forces in Northwestern liberal democracies’ on 17 October 2025. The doctoral research was supervised by Maartje van der Woude and Erwin Muller.

Conference, Meet us in your country

Psycholinguistic research

Once you have obtained your bachelor’s degree, you will be ready for a next step: continuing your studies or entering the job market. Completing the Linguistics bachelor’s programme will give you an excellent preparation for both options.

Research framework CIAS

Using brain imaging to discover the area in the brain that recognizes emotion.

Leiden University offers ambitious students the latest knowledge and the freedom to develop their own area of expertise.

This PhD project investigates how automatic sign language recognition technology can be further developed to analyse static images and textual descriptions of signs.

Language can be a time machine: we can learn from ancient texts how our ancestors interacted with the world around them. But can language also teach us something about people whose language has been lost? PhD candidate Anthony Jakob investigated whether the languages of prehistoric populations left…

The LUCL Labs consist of four spaces equipped to conduct high-quality experimental linguistic research.

On the 26th of February, Joane de Lima Santiago successfully defended her doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Joane on this achievement.

You can ask virtual assistant Siri about the weather, but you can’t have a real conversation with it yet. You can’t refer to anything that’s been said before, or ask the system why it says what it says. Stephan Raaijmakers, Professor by Special Appointment from TNO, hopes to change this.

The pre-master's is a bridging programme for students who have applied for the MA Linguistics, but who, according to the Board of Admissions, still have deficiencies in their educational background. Once you have completed the pre-master’s programme, you will be admitted to the relevant specialization…

PhD defence

About 90 per cent of Austronesian and Papuan languages are under threat of soon becoming extinct. Marian Klamer is the only professor in the world who researches both these language groups. She records languages before they disappear and sheds new light on the history of Indonesia. Inaugural lecture…

Lecture

On July 5th, Mulugeta Tarekegne Tsegaye succesfully defended his doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Mulugeta on this great result.

On the 4th of June, Menghui Shi successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Menghui Shi on this achievement!

This book investigates the effects of brain lesions in the left hemisphere, specifically Broca's area, on the production and perception of vowels, of word tones and of the linguistic use of sentence melody.

On the 5th of November, Timothy Gaved successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Timothy on this achievement!

On May 2nd, Petr Kocharov succesfully defended his doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Petr on this great result.

On the 25th of September, Alzenir Mendes Martins de Menezes successfully defended a doctoral thesis. Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Alzenir on this achievement!

This book explores the fascinating microvariation in Bantu languages and proposes a new syntactic analysis of subject and object agreement crosslinguistically. This book is open access!

This project examines the notion of sacred fertility and sacred landscapes, associated rituals and material culture, both archaeological and ethnographic manifestations in the Horn of Africa.

This thesis presents a detailed description of the phonology, the tone system and the grammar of Liko, a Bantu language spoken by about 70,000 people in the northeastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It provides numerous examples.

On the 28th of September, Jiang Wu successfully defended a doctoral thesis. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Jiang on this achievement!

This book provides a grammatical sketch, glossed texts and a glossary of Tarifiyt Berber, which is the main heritage language of the Moroccan community in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany.