This dissertation addresses the semantics of pluractional verbs in Hausa.

This is a study of Plateau Shimakonde, a sub-dialect of the Makonde language which is spoken on the Makonde Plateau in northern Mozambique.

This dissertation presents a description of Sandawe, a Khoisan language spoken by approximately 60 000 speakers in Dodoma Region, Tanzania.

This book is a first comparative study of the Nuni dialects.

This dissertation provides a description of the language Tadaksahak as it is spoken by the Idaksahak, a people group of about 30,000 living in the most eastern part of Mali and several isolated places in western Niger.

This book presents a comprehensive description of the grammar of Logba, one of the fourteen Ghana-Togo Mountain (GTM) languages spoken by approximately 7,500 speakers on the South-Eastern frontier of the Ghana-Togo border. It is the outcome of fifteen months research in Logba speaking communities.

This study offers a comprehensive but balanced grammatical analysis of Ik (Icetod), Northeast Uganda’s last thriving Kuliak language.

This thesis investigates the grammar of Gaahmg, a Nilo-Saharan, Eastern Sudanic language spoken in the Blue Nile Province of North Sudan. The comprehensive description provides an analysis of the phonology, morphology, and syntax. Ten texts of various genre are given to help illustrated the grammar…

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

This dissertation for the first time provides a detailed description of Benchnon, a language spoken by approximately 200.000 people in Southwest Ethiopia.

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

This book presents the first comprehensive study of Dime, an endangered Omotic language spoken by about 5400 speakers in south-west Ethiopia. The study presents analysis of the phonology, morphology and syntax of the language as well as a sample of ten texts and an extensive word list.

In this project, the hypothesis that language contact crucially impacts the development of spatial grammar and phonology is investigated.

This thesis investigates the grammar of Sheko, an Omotic language spoken in southwest Ethiopia.

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

In this dissertation a large corpus of letter signs and texts gathered during fieldwork in Niger, and to a lesser extent Mali and Burkina Faso is used to show the graphemic diversity of the traditional script of the Tuaregs, tifinagh, and to analyze the orthographic system.

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…

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

This dissertation provides a description of the phonology and morphology of Mambay, an Adamawa (Niger-Congo) language spoken by 15,000 people in Chad and Cameroon.

This thesis investigates the syntax of object marking in Sambaa and the Bantu languages in general, with particular focus on Swahili and Haya, as points of comparison.

This dissertation investigates the grammar of Makhuwa-Enahara, a Bantu language spoken in the north of Mozambique. The information structure is an influential factor in this language, determining the word order and the use of special conjugations known as conjoint and disjoint verb forms.

Conference, Online

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…

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

This dissertation presents the first full grammatical description of bago ts'amakkilo ('mouth of the Ts'amakko'), or simply Ts'amakko. It is a Cushitic language, spoken in Southwest Ethiopia and belongs to the Dullay cluster of Lowland East Cushitic. The number of speakers is about 10,000. The data…

Linguist Sara Petrollino has written the first detailed grammar of Hamar, a language spoken in south-west Ethiopia that has some unique characteristics. PhD defence 10 November.

PhD Defence

Conference, Colloquium

Conference

Conference

The master’s in African Studies at Leiden University is an advanced area studies qualification that combines world-class scholarship with practice-based learning.

Do you have an open-minded and unprejudiced worldview and do you want to get the know the African continent? In the Dutch-taught Bachelor's programme African Languages and Cultures you will dive into the fascinating culture, history and literature of Africa, and you will learn how to read and speak…

African oral literatures, new media and technologies: challenges for research and documentation

This thesis attempts to describe the entire corpus of Latino-Punic inscriptions, found in Tripolitania.

This project employs a systematic experimental approach to examine the interaction of these two hitherto independent lines of research (tone sandhi and focus realization) in six dialects of Chinese, which lie on a continuum between dialects with dense tonal distributions and sparser distributions. In…

Humanities, Centre for Linguistics

Humanities, Institute for History

The languages of the Mbam-et-Inoubou District of the Centre Region of Cameroon have a unique position in Bantu linguistics. Being in between "narrow" Bantu and "wide" Bantu, they sometimes pattern with the one and sometimes with the other, and as such are a rich motherlode for comparative and historical…

The Rabobank has awarded Leiden University 50,000 euro for a ‘study-related' purpose. The gift is to be used to allow two African students to follow the research master’s programme in African Studies in Leiden.