How would you convert Egyptian hieroglyphs into Latin script? And what is actually the correct translation of dishes on a Vietnamese menu? On Saturday 28 January, high school students from all over the Netherlands will come to Leiden to ponder a series of language-related puzzles. Their goal? To win…

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

Novel language learning activates different neural processes than was previously thought. A Leiden research team has discovered parallel but separate contributions from the hippocampus and Broca's area, the learning centre in the left hemisphere. The right hemisphere of the brain also seems to play…

Now available on YouTube!

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

For decades, scholars have wondered about the development and dissemination of languages around the world. What are the odds that peoples living thousands of miles apart speak varieties of Indo-European languages that are closely related? This riddle has now partly been solved thanks to an international…

This study describes religion in Java.

Cette étude montre que le développement phonético-phonologique en fulfulde et bambara est à la foiscomparable au développement langagier dans d’autres langues du monde et influencé par les caractéristiques phonétiques et phonologiques de ces deux langues notamment au niveau de la phonotaxe.

In the new video series 'The World of Linguistics', alumni and researchers talk about their passion for their field. Professor of African Linguistics Maarten Mous explains the importance of hearing your language at school.

Maarten Mous, Professor of African Linguistics at Leiden University, looks back on the 50th edition of the Colloquium of African Languages and Linguistics (CALL) and explains why this birthday was a celebration like no other.

Professor Johan Rooryck will be examining cognition and core knowledge systems and how possession is expressed in different languages. Rooryck and fellow researchers have been awarded two NWO grants totalling 2.75 million euro to carry out two research programmes: 'Knowledge and Culture' and 'Lend me…

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.

The present study comprises a classification and analysis of the syntax of the non-verbal clause in Qumran Hebrew, i.e. the linguistic variety (or varieties) found in the so-called Dead Sea Scrolls. The corpus consists of the non-biblical texts written in Hebrew; biblical texts and texts written in…

Linguist Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade retired in July, but is pressing on regardless with her languages in The Hague project. An online tour of her Hague Proverbs launched recently and Tieken also has academic publications in the pipeline.

The Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition (LIBC) is concentrating increasingly on research into the role of the brain in language development. The institute has now set up the LIBC Language website that brings together all the information on this research.

On 7 October, a court in Athens, Greece, convicted leaders of the far-right Golden Dawn party as directing a criminal organization. Marina Terkourafi, professor of Sociolinguistics, discusses the landmark ruling for the Leiden International Studies Blog.

According to Russian propaganda Ukrainians are Nazis and people from the West are Satanists. Egbert Fortuin thinks we should take this propaganda seriously.

This grammar presents an in-depth linguistic description of one Papuan Malay variety, based on fifteen hours of recordings of spontaneous narratives and conversations between Papuan Malay speakers.

The prehistory of communication metaphors

The Leiden Summerschool in Languages and Linguistics, including courses in Papyrology, is now open. BA/MA/PhD students are welcome to attend.

This fall, LUCIS will have the pleasure of welcoming Professor Maribel Fierro, Research Professor at the CSIC (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Madrid), to Leiden. She is the third Abdulaziz Saud Al-Babtain Cultural Foundation Visiting Professor in Arabic Culture at Leiden University…

Erik-Jan Zürcher, professor of Turkish languages and cultures, returns his Turkish medal to protest against the repressive regime of Erdogan's government.

The presents thesis investigates the extent to which Chinese, Dutch and American speakers of English are mutually intelligible. Intelligibility of vowels, simplex consonants and consonant clusters was tested in meaningless sound sequences, as well as in words in meaningless and meaningful short sent…

Maarten Mous, Professor of African Linguistics at Leiden University, looks back on the 50th edition of the Colloquium of African Languages and Linguistics (CALL) and explains why this birthday was a celebration like no other.

A large interdisciplinary NWO research project attempted to discover the cognitive origin of the human ability to learn linguistic rules. This is not so simple, according to linguist Andreea Geambaşu and her colleagues. PhD defence on 11 December.

What is lobbying? How does it work? Starting February 2 Leiden University professors, Jaap de Jong and Arco Timmermans will introduce high school students to the language of lobbying. Digital classes together with a teacher's kit will be available in Dutch from February.

At one time, the railway from Kimberley to Kambove in Southern Africa symbolised prosperity and progress. Today, the exhausted mining towns along its route are marked by decay and pollution. Professor Jan-Bart Gewald has been awarded an NWO L grant to investigate the long-term global consequences.

Exploring the language of the lower classes in the nineteenth century

This dissertation provides a description of Makonde, a Bantu language spoken in Tanzania.

Important note: upon careful consideration, we have decided to resume our Dutch language courses.

Our courses September courses start soon, be sure to apply in time

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…

University Lecturer Nadine Akkerman concluded her book tour for her book 'Invisible Agents' in England at the Hay Festival. At the festival, attended by almost four thousand people, Invisible Agents was one of the most discussed books and caught the attention of the national newspaper and The Times.

This project seeks to close the gap between the three main players in the field of prescriptivism: the linguists themselves, the prescriptivists (as writers of usage guides) and those who depend upon such manuals.

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Lexicographical description of Greek; production of Greek-Dutch dictionary

The book on Turkey. A Modern History written by Professor Erik-Jan Zürcher, Professor of Turkish Studies, is now available in nine different languages. Arabic and Polish versions have now been published.

The Feature Co-occurrence Constraint theory proposed in this dissertation provides a means to capture the development of the language learning child's segment inventory.

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…

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

A European project should help reinvigorate Latin teaching in secondary schools. 'By focusing on citizenship, we want to show that Latin is relevant to discussions about citizenship and migration.'

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

Students with learning problems experience difficulties in reading, writing, and content-area learning into and throughout their secondary-school years

In this research, for the first time a detailed description as well as systematic and comparative analysis of the final particle system in Chinese are provided.

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

Man is nature's mind-reading champion: we are better able than any other living beings to empathise with others. This comes in part from our story-telling culture, according to Max van Duijn. PhD defence 20 April.

This project examines the intriguing relationship between Greek literary criticism and Latin literature in Rome (first centuries BC and AD).