All languages change over time, which means that a single language can break up into several distinct daughter languages in the course of a few centuries. This is how hundreds of languages spoken in Europe and Asia ultimately descend from a single ancestor language spoken some 5,000 years ago. In this specialisation, you will learn how to reconstruct this Proto-Indo-European language by analysing and comparing its daughter languages, focusing on Sanskrit, Ancient Greek, Hittite, Gothic, and Lithuanian. You will learn about language change and reconstruction, as well as how historical linguistics contributes to the study of human prehistory, alongside fields such as archaeology and palaeogenetics.

All languages have a grammatical structure, but only about five hundred of the roughly six thousand languages in the world have been documented to a reasonable extent. Thousands of languages are still waiting for an eager linguist to discover and document their structure before they disappear. If these languages are described, education can be developed so that people will be able to read and write their own language. Language description is important because each newly described language gives us new insights into the variation in language. Descriptive Linguistics focuses on this key area. 

Language is a system, and this is what we study in the Language and Cognition specialisation; we explore language models that try to explain how language is represented in the brain, how children develop language systems, and how brain damage can affect these systems. You will learn to develop and conduct language experiments, while working in one of our four language laboratories: the Babylab, EEG lab, Phonetics lab, or the Eye-tracking lab. In the sub-track Computational Linguistics you will learn how to code, and you will be introduced to the principles behind how Large Language Models (like ChatGPT) work. This specialisation touches on numerous research fields such as psychology, neuroscience, and computer science.

Among humans, language is used to inform, entertain, or convince, but also to construct an identity. In other words, language use is functional – but how does this work? Which principles and rules do people apply when they use language in these ways? In the specialisation Language in Use / Taal in Gebruik, which is primarily taught in Dutch, you will explore questions such as: What are the effects of language use? How do we strategically use language to achieve a certain goal? What is the link between language and identity? You will expand your knowledge about the persuasive power of language and how language and society mutually influence each other.

Most of us are not surprised to hear a teenager using a popular slang word, but what if a fifty-year-old uses the same word? Consciously and subconsciously, we use language to show that we belong to a certain group. In this course, you will explore how language functions as a social phenomenon.

Language consists of sounds (or signs). While sounds themselves do not possess a specific meaning, they do convey meaning: we acquire language through the sounds that belong to it. Phonology is about the sound systems of different languages: the units of sound and how they influence each other.

This course studies how linguistics can be used to reconstruct prehistory and history, and how, on the other hand, history changes language. Subjects that will be treated include: how to classify languages historically; how did lost languages leave their traces in modern languages or in toponyms; theories of language contact; pidgins and creoles.

Of the 6000 languages in the world, only about 500 have been documented. To transcribe the words of an undocumented language you need an alphabet that can accommodate every language sound in the world. In this interesting and fun course, you learn to name, recognise, and produce foreign sounds that you did not even know existed.