Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL) is a reputable institute in the field of linguistics, offering excellent research and education opportunities covering a broad range of languages of the world.

Taal als sleutel tot het begrijpen van de mens.

As part Leiden University's interdisciplinary programme Social Resilience and Security, dr. Marieke Liem has been appointed Professor Security and Interventions effective 1 January 2020.

Lecture, Com(parative) Syn(tax) Series

The Research Master in Linguistics is a specialised research-based programme offered at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL). It is modelled on LUCL’s unique profile of studying language diversity by means of a wide variety of theoretical and methodological approaches.

Professor Felix Ameka and university lecturer Maria del Carmen Parafita Couta have received an NWO Open Competition grant together with Enoch Aboh (University of Amsterdam) to do research on ‘code-switching’: switching languages by multilinguals.

Since April 2017 the LUCDH team has received reinforcement in the shape of two brand-new Phd candidates. They will be working on existing projects set up by Victoria Nyst and Sjef Barbiers. I have the pleasure of introducing them here.

Study information

The application procedure is broken down into three parts.

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…

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.

Police investigations use wiretapped phone recordings as investigative material fairly regularly. But how do they know that the voice on the recording actually belongs to the suspect? PhD student Laura Smorenburg is trying to answer that question.

Where does Dutch come from? Newly appointed Professor Alwin Kloekhorst looks for an answer to that question in millennia-old languages from Anatolia, the Asian part of present-day Turkey. 'A new interpretation in one of the Anatolian languages can have consequences for dozens of other languages.'

Three Leiden students will be sharing their knowledge of history while playing video games. The livestreams are part of the ‘Streaming the Past’ project and will be available on the popular streaming platform Twitch. The first livestream will be on Thursday 20 May.

With the support of the Foundation for Refugee Students UAF, Russia expert Oshank Hashemi, a cum laude graduate of Leiden University, has won the Peter Baehr Prize 2016.

At LUCL, researchers aim to understand, describe, and preserve the linguistic diversity of the indigenous Americas.

What is your preferred career path? Would you like to teach? Do you enjoy doing research? Or would you prefer a job that involves writing and editing? You will find that your Linguistics degree is a perfect preparation for the career of your choice.

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.

At LUCL we study almost all aspects of a wide range of African languages. From phonology to anthropological linguistics, from theoretical syntax to urban youth languages, we study it all.

The specialisation in Modern Languages explores the structure, acquisition, history and use of five languages.

Carsten de Dreu has received the Carol and Ed Diener Award in Social Psychology which is designed to recognise a mid-career scholar whose work has added substantially to the body of knowledge to the social psychology field and brings together personality psychology and social psychology.

Sara Polak, American Studies expert and University Lecturer investigates how American presidents deal with the media and how new, social media influence our collective memory and the political game. ‘Social media algorithms influence us and our political choices in ways we do not foresee’, Polak say…

Workshop Series

Innovation through repetition. That is how university lecturer Jurriaan Witteman describes his research on the automatic processing of angry voices in the brain. The original research was conducted 20 years ago, but, with an NWO grant, Witteman is now going to see if those results are accurate.

In this dissertation, electrophysiological (EEG) and behavioural measures are used to investigate how allophonic tonal variants and sub-phonemic features are processed during Mandarin and Dutch speech production, visual processing of written words and reading aloud.

In an appeal case, an employee of a care organisation in Nijmegen who was shown the door because of her criticism about the coronavirus voiced on LinkedIn, has had her dismissal reviewed. The court in Arnhem ruled that the employee had crossed a line and that her employer was entitled to dismiss her…

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.

A linguistic prehistory of the Tarim Basin in Northwest China

Exclusion elicits the same response in children as in adolescents and adults. That is what psychologist Mara van der Meulen found when she studied brain activity in primary schoolchildren. ‘What is new for us is that it is the same in childhood as later in life.’ Doctoral defence on 10 December.

PhD defence

Each year, Latin American diplomats meet the researchers and students from Leiden University who specialise in their region. This year, they visited the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences. ‘The social and behavioural sciences have improved our understanding of social unrest.’

Schuurman examines how Russia is escalating its covert operations against European countries.

A comparative analysis of legitimation strategies in tree hybrid regimes: Russia, Venezuela, and Seychelles.

Find out how to apply for Linguistics at Leiden University by following our step-by step guide.

Collaborative linguistic research on indigenous languages of Ecuador: description, documentation & materials

Morphology is the grammar of words. Morphologists study how words are built and what principles govern their form and their function.

On October 9th, Peter Alexander Kerkhof succesfully defended his doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Peter Alexander on this great result.