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

For many deaf Ghanaians, Ghanaian Sign Language is their first language. But for more deaf signers to be able to fully participate in society, more sign language interpreters, deaf school teachers and family members need to be trained. What better way to facilitate this by means of a Ghanaian Sign Language…

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…

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…

Conference

Exploring new methods in comparing Sign Language corpora: Analysing cross-linguistic variation in the lexicon

Academic studies or an academic career are a big challenge if you are deaf. Particularly in Africa, where many countries don’t even have secondary schools for the deaf. A team of Leiden academics has organised the first summer school for and by deaf academics on the African continent, in Ghana. We spoke…

Conference

Across cultures, parents help their children master the social and linguistic codes needed in adult life. Recent research on language socialization found important cross-cultural differences, pointing out the need for more diversity for a full understanding of this process. Deaf communities form…

Currently the focus of the project is the development of a tool that utilizes dimensionality reduction techniques in order to analyze and interpret the lexical and phonological variation between different sign languages. Additionally, the application of deep learning techniques for the extraction of…

This book celebrates Maarten Mous, professor of African Linguistics at Leiden University.

How did African actors engage with the idea of Eurafrica?

This Collaborative Research Group acts primarily as a platform for discussion of historical issues related to the African continent, its place in the world and in African Studies.

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

The research master's in African Studies at Leiden University is unique in continental Europe for the interdisciplinary range of subjects offered and the variety of perspectives.

Africa has a population of 1.5 billion people. In 30 years’ time, this will be 2.5 billion. The continent’s impact on the global economy, but also on the environment, will therefore increase drastically.

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…

Language offers new insights into our history, cultural differences, migration, and the way in which our brain processes information. This knowledge can in turn help us understand what it means to be human, as well as opening the way to many practical applications. In order to realise these goals, linguists…

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

Published by Brill Nijhoff and written by leading experts including national judges, academics and practitioners East African Community Law is the first comparative as well as open access textbook on EAC law. The book provides a key resource for the research, teaching, and practice of EAC law. It also…

In the last couple of decades an ‘animal turn’ has taken place in the social sciences. This has led to a call to study social issues by including non-human animal perspectives. This Collaborative Research Group thinks it's high time that African Studies joins the chorus of minds that try to contribute…

How do Central African refugees navigate through uncertainty in a new and hostile environment in the DR Congo?

African Studies Centre Leiden

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

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

For his PhD project, computer scientist Manolis Fragkiadakis is developing a tool that can compare videos of sign language corpora. This would make it possible to detect differences between sign languages and prevent translation errors. Ultimately, the tool could be used to compare sign languages from…

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.

The ASCL Research Programme for the years 2019-2024 is called ‘Strident Africa: Societal and Environmental Change in the Context of 50 Centuries of History’. It examines the dramatic changes taking place on the continent in terms of population growth, urbanization, the role of external actors and the…

Madeleine Hosli, Professor of International Relations at Leiden University, together with two other authors, wrote a chapter in Group Politics in UN Multilateralism. This chapter assesses the composition and functioning of the African Union (AU) within the United Nations.

In the South African context, certain iconic images have been a dominant source for public understandings of historical events. The emphasis given these images tends to overshadow the historical value of other more personal photographic sources – like studio or amateur photography. This project looks…

The present investigation aims at exploring whether the instruction provided at secondary schools in the capital meets the requirements of Communicative Language Teaching and whether the aims of improving learners’ communicative proficiency are met.

On the 4th of June, Andreas Joswig successfully defended his doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Andreas on this great result.

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 ultimate aim of the project is to find out whether there are such things as

The project Multimedia Research and Documentation of African Oral Genres: Connecting Diasporas and Local Audiences (Director: D.Merolla) focuses on multimedia as technology that allows scholars to share documentation and scientific knowledge with the cultural owners of the collected oral genres.

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

This project explores how Muslim authorities and writers use Russian to transmit Islamic contents, and whether this leads to a specific "Islamic sociolect" of the Russian language.

The project

Will Leiden be the first city to have wall poems in sign language? It will, if sign language researcher Victoria Nyst has her way. She recently started a crowdfunding campaign together with the Leiden Language Museum and the TEGEN-BEELD Foundation.

The Academic Language Centre organises language courses for companies, government agencies, private clients, and students and staff members of Leiden University.

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

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.

An Ancient Egyptian System of Workmen’s Identity Marks