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.

PhD defence

The AAM-LR project aims at building a demonstrator of a web service that will help filed researchers to annotate audio- and video-recordings.

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

This study aims to reveal how national, regional, public and private television stations in Indonesia – each in their own ways and for their own aims - represent aspects of Javaneseness.

On the 6th of July, Anthony Jakob successfully defended a doctoral thesis. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Anthony on this achievement!

This project intends to provide an integrated linguistic assessment of the hypothesised migration route of the Tocharians.

This dissertation presents a comprehensive description of Xinka, an indigenous language from southeastern Guatemala. The description is based on a missionary grammar that is titled Arte de la lengua szinca and was written by the priest Manuel Maldonado de Matos around 1773.

On the 12th of December, Eleanor Dutton successfully defended her doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Eleanor on this achievement.

The research focuses on the understanding of symbolic stratigraphy of the land (through time) from the worldview of the People of the Rain (one of the Indigenous Peoples of southern Mexico), by studying contemporary cultural heritage in communities of the Mixtec Highlands.

This dissertation provides a comprehensive overview of the grammar of Bantawa, a Kiranti (Rai) language spoken in Eastern Nepal.

Your time at Leiden is about more than just studying. Some of your best experiences will stem from being a part of our lively and diverse student community, as well as from life in the beautiful city of Leiden.

Lecture, LUCL Colloquium

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.

On the 27th of February, Marta Morgado successfully defended a doctoral thesis. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Marta on this achievement!

Studying languages enables you to unearth a lot of valuable information about humans: it reveals our history and explains cultural differences and it even illustrates the process of learning new information. The University is sharing its knowledge of and passion for languages in various new ways, including…

Alternative perspectives and sources of colonial literature haven’t received much attention before now. School books have long ignored the violence that accompanies colonialsm. How can we paint an honest picture?

Interested in studying Modern Languages at Leiden University? Find out what our alumni said about this master's programme.

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.

In The Golden Mean of Languages, Alisa van de Haar sheds new light on the debates regarding the form and status of the vernacular in the early modern Low Countries, where both Dutch and French were local tongues. The fascination with the history, grammar, spelling, and vocabulary of Dutch and French…

Conference

Linguist Willem Adelaar was appointed to Knight in the Order of the Dutch Lion on October 1st. On that very same day he celebrated his 43-year connection to Leiden University. Adelaar has an impressive track record in the field of indigenous, and often endangered, Amerindian languages.

Conference

Learn the newest insights from established scholars.

This dissertation provides a grammatical description of Ghomara Berber, a Berber language spoken in North-West Morocco by about 10.000 people. The grammar consists of a description of the phonology, the morphology and the syntax. In the appendices a number of texts and a wordlist are included. The data…

'Every year the courses are different, and there are new things to learn.' The 6th Leiden Summer School in Languages and Linguistics from 18-29 July this year has attracted 120 participants, 90 international and 30 from the Netherlands.

This volume offers a multidisciplinary view of cutting-edge research on bilingualism in Spanish and Portuguese-speaking regions, with the aim of building a bridge between sub-fields and approaches that often find themselves isolated from one another.

By documenting lexical and morpho-syntactic patterns among P’urhepecha speakers in Mexico and the US diaspora, this project will investigate the sources of language variation. The ensuing online dialect atlas will serve as an online resource for speakers, learners and researchers of the language.

If you’ve graduated from the programme and you want to further your academic education you can continue with a master’s programme. It will earn you the title of Master of Arts (MA) and significantly increase your chances of finding a position at academic level.

Hekmat Dirbas defended his thesis on 14 February 2017

This dissertation presents the first full grammatical description of bago ts'amakkilo ('mouth of the Ts'amakko'), or simply Ts'amakko. It is a Cushitic language, spoken in Southwest Ethiopia and belongs to the Dullay cluster of Lowland East Cushitic. The number of speakers is about 10,000. The data…

This study looks at the diverse phonological systems found within Central Chadic, and reconstructs the phonological system of their ancestor language.