This thesis presents a thorough survey of the central aspects of the phonology of Shaoxing Chinese from a synchronic perspective and on the basis of recent theoretical phonological developments, with the secondary goal of casting some light on current issues in Modern Chinese (Mandarin).

Nadia Soudzilovskaia (CML), Martijn Bezemer (IBL / NIOO) and Harrie van der Hagen (ecologist at Dunea) gave an interview to NPO1 Radio about the TERRA-Dunes project.

What role do the soil and soil organisms play in the restoration of nature quality? This is what researchers at Leiden University are going to find out, together with water company and nature manager Dunea. They will do this by inoculating soil, whether or not sterilized, with soil and seeds. On Friday…

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.

In this dissertation, the types of context Dutch speakers need to interpret the poly-interpretable word ergens ‘somewhere/anywhere’ are studied.

Promotor: Prof.dr. W.J.G.M. Peijnenburg, Co-promotor: Dr. ing. M.G. Vijver

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)…

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

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.

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 main question of this research project concerns the extent to which light verbs in West Germanic languages participate in processes of language change.

This dissertation provides a formal description of the relationship between diatopic/diachronic micro-variation and phonologization through analysis of the phonetic/phonological properties of unstressed vowel reduction and vowel insertion in two Northern Italian dialects.

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.

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.

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!

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

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

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

Set up in 1991, this unique project aims to identify and describe the common lexical heritage of the most important Indo-European languages and language branches. The project has thus far resulted in twelve volumes published as The Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series (Brill, Leiden).

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.

On this page you can find information about previous CCLS events.

Graduates of International Studies are attractive candidates for international employers in a wide variety of fields – think NGOs, multinationals, humanitarian or governmental agencies. Your deep region-specific knowledge and language, academic and practical skills prepare you for a Master, as well…

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.

Lecture

This project investigates the influence that Arabic (esp. dialectal Arabic) has had on the Berber languages of Northern Africa.

This project examines how speakers store and process regular pitch variation.

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

‘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.'

1. To what extent do metallic NPs added to soil extractions change the activity, abundance, or community composition of microbes? 2. How do the effects of metallic NPs on soil microbes differ from the effects of the ions shedding from corresponding NPs?

The rapidly increasing commercial application of metallic nanoparticles within products will inevitably enhance the amount of NPs being released into soil.

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

Tonal bilinguals of two closely related Chinese dialects are amazing people. They handle two tonal systems in their mind; their two vocabularies are from closely related dialects, and they write translation equivalents with common Chinese characters. Their unique language situation makes their mind…

This publication aims at the analysis of the performance of a corpus of Fongbe stories that I collected in three villages in the south of Benin in 1976 and 1977. The corpus consists of 37 stories (57.000 words). The stories aim at children’s education.

This dissertation investigates Extended Lexical Units (ELUs), elements that are bigger than just one word and which are stored in the Lexicon.

This dissertation the role of the English dissenting minister Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) as a grammarian is studied.

This projects investigates spatial relations between soils and other resources and the urban layout of a classic Maya center in Campeche, Mexico.

Microbiome composition of the spermosphere and the rhizosphere of wild and modern bean accessions grown in an agricultural and a native soil from Colombia was characterized by metagenomics and cultivation-dependent approaches.

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.'

This grammar describes Sumerian, an ancient Near Eastern language which was spoken in what is now southern Iraq, on the basis of written sources dating from about 2500 to 2000 BC.