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…

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.

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.

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

With the rise of AI, interest in computational linguistics and language models has taken flight. But machines are far from being able to go it alone. In her inaugural lecture, Professor Carole Tiberius will stress the importance of research on word combinations. ‘We know a great deal but there is a…

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

Ömer Koçyigit defended his thesis on 7 July 2020

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

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

Dr. Janet Grijzenhout (Universität Konstanz) was appointed Professor English Linguistics and will be working at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL).

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.

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

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…

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

This 862-page monograph is a grammar of Thangmi, an endangered Tibeto-Burman language spoken in the districts of Dolakha and Sindhupalcok in central-eastern Nepal.

When researching languages in historical context, our goal is to understand the nature of linguistic variation in the past, and explain the extent to which the socio-cultural context of bygone times contributed to shaping linguistic variation and change.

A synchronic description of the endangered Slovene dialect spoken in the Gailtal valley in Carinthia, Austria.

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

Recently, Engin Yüksel gave a lecture on Russian military concepts from 1853 to the present day and his observations on the Russo-Ukrainian war at the Faculty of Humanities, premised on his recently completed doctoral research.

This doctoral thesis elaborates Langacker’s reference-point model by applying it to lexical semantics.

The current study focuses on Walpole’s social network and the language as contained in the letters of the network members.

The goal of the MODOMA-project is to create a computer model of language acquisition.

This book sheds new light on domestic forced migration by examining the experiences of American-born slave migrants from a comparative perspective.

In prehistoric times there was a huge wave of migration, from the steppes in Russia and Ukraine to West Europe. The newcomers’ genes began to dominate. Archaeology research in Leiden into burial mounds in the Veluwe and Utrechtse Heuvelrug areas of the Netherlands yielded this spectacular conclusion.…

This research project focuses on the extended documentation and investigation of these non-Austronesian (‘Papuan’) languages.

Alanna O'Malley, Associate Professor at Leiden University Institute for History, talks about the possible expelling of the Russian ambassador Yuriy Filatov and the risks that come with the decision.

This thesis is a sample-based typological study of formal and semantic patterns in terms for a selection of referring (

Dutch agents, military personnel, prosecution personnel and diplomats in Ukraine have been spied on by intelligence services from Ukraine and Russia after the MH17 disaster. Reliable sources reported this to RTL Nieuws. The espionage by Ukraine is very sensitive, because it is highly unusual that espionage…