This proposal aims at the construction of a comprehensive and authoritative scientific grammar for Dutch and Frisian in the form of a virtual language institute: het Taalportaal/the Language Portal.

Rector Magnificus Carel Stolker will retire on 8 February. If there’s one theme running through his career, it’s the links between the University and society. In this series of pre-retirement discussions, Stolker will talk one last time to people from within and without the University. In this first…

This dissertation is the first comprehensive description of Makalero, a language spoken by approximately 6,500 speakers in the Iliomar subdistrict, in the south-east of the Republic of East Timor. While previous sources considered it to be a dialect of the larger language Makasae, the present study,…

This dissertation provides an overview of the phonological developments of the Qinghai-Gansu languages, comparing them to the reconstructed ancestral language.

The form and content of the course are determined by your answers on the intake form and, if necessary, an intake interview.

In 2019, Aliaksandr Lukashenka marks a quarter of a century as the first, and so far only president of the Republic of Belarus. This new book by Dr. Matthew Frear, Assistant Professor of Russian and Eurasian Studies, offers the most up-to-date analysis of government and politics in a country usually…

The New Jersey Chapter of the international Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences

In a new video on the Faculty of Humanities' YouTube-channel, we follow MA student Russian and Eurasian Studies Sophie. She is doing an internship at VPRO's OVT, a weekly Dutch radio show that provides historical backgrounds for news, columns and documentaries.

Design of a Linguistic System for Interstellar Communication Based on Logic

The purpose of this programme is to join knowledge and insights from linguistics, literary analysis, and rhetoric, for the purpose of developing a set of methods for the stylistic investigation of any type of text in Dutch.

The aim of this project is the linguistic documentation of Bakola, a Narrow Bantu language.

This dissertation presents a grammar of Khwarshi, a Nakh-Daghestanian language.

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…

Ben de Jong, inlichtingen-deskundige en gastonderzoeker en -docent bij het ISGA aan de Universiteit Leiden, werd geciteerd in een artikel in het Algemeen Dagblad over topografische kaarten die de Russen tijdens de Koude Oorlog gebruikten. De Sovjet-Unie beschikte over een ongelofelijke hoeveelheid…

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has also had dramatic consequences for Ukrainian students at Leiden University. Besides their intense concern about the fate of family and friends, they also face major financial problems. This also applies to Russian students who can no longer access their bank accounts.…

The largest international conference on English historical linguistics is coming to Leiden. From 7 June to 11 June 2021, the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL) organises the International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL-21). Due to Covid measures, the conference takes…

Studying linguistics at the Leiden University Centre of Linguistics (LUCL) is a challenging but rewarding experience. There are few places in the world where such a broad range of languages are studied from so many different perspectives.

Did the Jochids leave their mark on the Grand Duchy, taking into account that the Lithuanian state was one of the main successor states of the Great Horde in the 16thCentury?

The Hague is the archetypal multicultural city. With a different language spoken on every street corner, this makes it a paradise for linguists such as Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade. Her book Languages of The Hague is a collection of fascinating conversations with the city’s non-native speakers.

This dissertation provides a description of Konso, a Cushitic language spoken by about 250,000 speakers in the South-West Ethiopia.

This project aims to revisit the ways in which religious minorities in the Middle East participated in, contributed to, and opposed the Arab nationalism of the post-war years, when the British and French ruled the region via the Mandates. Research question: How did religious minorities in the Middle…

President Putin will be officially opening the Netherlands–Russia Year on 8 April in Amsterdam. Leiden Slavist Sjeng Scheijen was responsible for putting together the cultural programme. How much freedom did he have in doing so? ‘The Dutch photography project on the demolition of Sochi districts was…

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

In this dissertation, a corpus of 595 seventeenth-century letters (mainly private ones) written between 1664 and 1672 is examined from a sociolinguistic perspective.

The main goal of this project is to answer the question: how did Dutch acquire its own, distinctive linguistic characteristics?

This study proposes a theory for the encoding of specificity and definiteness in the Chinese nominal based on Cantonese, Mandarin and Wenzhou data.

Below you can find lists of Leiden-based and international organizations working on Central Asia, and an overview of useful resources on Central Asia.

LUCAS members are experts in the fields of literary history and theory, film and media studies, and art, architectural, and book history. Members of LUCAS teach in a wide variety of Bachelor's, Master’s, and Research Master’s Programmes.

You’ve been accepted! Leiden University looks forward to welcoming you as a new student. Your next step is to prepare for your studies. Below you can find some tips to help you get a head start as you embark on your studies at Leiden University.

Get to know us through our online and in-person events for prospective students!

Ömer Koçyigit defended his thesis on 7 July 2020

On Energiepodium.nl, Rob de Wijk, Professor of International Relations and Security at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs, states that the Nord Stream 2 Project, a pipeline for Russian gas into Europe, causes a conflict between geopolitics and commerce.

This project aims at describing the Khoisan languages !Ora (Korana/Griqua) and !Ui of South Africa.

The general objective of this thesis is to determine a typology of verbal derivation in Ethiopian Afro-asiatic languages.

Umberto Selva, a Leiden graduate of the Research MA program of Linguistics, has received for his thesis the international award for best MA thesis in the field of Comparative Indo-European Linguistics of the year 2015.

Grammatical gender is famously the most puzzling of the grammatical categories. We have a solid typology of gender systems, yet exciting and unexpected patterns keep turning up which defy easy classification and straightforward analysis. Some of these question, stretch or threaten to cross the outer…

This book presents the first comprehensive description of Tafi, one of the fourteen Ghana-Togo Mountain (GTM) languages, spoken by approximately 4,400 people in the southeastern part of Ghana. The description consists of thirteen chapters and is based on a corpus gathered during two fieldwork periods…

This project aims at investigating the syntactic role of focus in ellipsis across languages.

This dissertation provides an up to date description of the Indo European lexical stock of Armenian (ca. 500 entries) with systematic inclusion of unused data that are found in Armenian dialects.