While all European nations have condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there is one country Russia can still count on: Belarus. Russia even used its territory as a stepping stone for the invasion. We spoke with Matthew Frear, Assistant Professor and expert on contemporary Belarus, to shed light…

This thesis investigates durational aspects of the Italian mobile diphthongs with respect to other rising diphthongs and monophthongs and it shows to what extent the monophthong/diphthong alternation still occurs in contemporary Italian.

This dissertation provides a grammatical description of the Awjila language, a small Berber language spoken in the Libyan oasis of Awjila.

This study explores the role of linguistic data in the reconstruction of Dolgan (pre)history by analyzing contact-induced changes and using them to infer information about the nature of the contact settings in which they occurred.

This project focuses on a striking parallelism between two macro-groups of languages: southern Italian dialects and the so-called split-ergative languages, like Basque, Georgian, Dyirbal, Hindi/Urdu.

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

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…

President Putin will be officially opening the Netherlands–Russia Year on 8 April in Amsterdam. Leiden Slavist Sjeng Scheijen was responsible for putting together the cultural programme. How much freedom did he have in doing so? ‘The Dutch photography project on the demolition of Sochi districts was…

The research programme Language Use in Past and Present brings together linguists within LUCL whose central focus is both on actual language data, including language use in earlier stages of the language, and, taking a variationist perspective, on language change in various aspects.

This project launches a research program into the theoretical status and the terminological basis of evidentiality systems.

This study examines the mutual intelligibility between all 225 pairs of 15 Chinese dialects, in two main branches, i.e., six Mandarin dialects and nine non-Mandarin (Southern) dialects.

Critical Perspectives on Western Agency and Eastern Re-appropriations

This thesis investigates the processing of words written in Japanese kanji and Chinese hànzì, i.e. logographic scripts.

The aim of this research was to establish if Ebeling's semiotactic theory and method of semiotactic analysis, as described in his works Syntax and Semantics (1978), Een Inleiding tot de Syntaxis (1994) and Semiotaxis, over Theoretische en Nederlandse Syntaxis (2006), could be applied to Modern Japanese…

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.

How did the slave peculium function in the socio-legal context of the Roman Empire?

Prof. Dr. Willem Adelaar has been elected as Honorary member of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA)

This dissertation investigates whether and how gradability is manifested in the nominal domain, as well as the implications this could have for theories of the representation of gradability.

Making extensive use of primary source materials this study contributes to existing scholarship in the field of eighteenth-century grammars and grammarians by providing an in-depth study of Ash’s Grammatical Institutes and its influence on other popular grammars for children.

This thesis presents a thorough survey of the central aspects of the phonology of Shaoxing Chinese from a synchronic perspective and on the basis of recent theoretical phonological developments, with the secondary goal of casting some light on current issues in Modern Chinese (Mandarin).

This dissertation provides a novel perspective on the interaction between quantifier scope and ellipsis. It presents a detailed investigation of the scopal interaction between English negative indefinites, modals, and quantified phrases in ellipsis. One of the crucial observations is that a negative…

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

Linguists Alwin Kloekhorst and Alexander Lubotsky from Leiden University made a great discovery this summer. They deciphered a few dozen inscriptions on pot shards found in Daskyleion (North-West Turkey) as Phrygian and Lydian, and thus proved the presence of the Phrygians and Lydians in that area.

In this dissertation, the types of context Dutch speakers need to interpret the poly-interpretable word ergens ‘somewhere/anywhere’ are studied.

The 10th edition of the World Congress of African Linguists (WOCAL), hosted by Leiden University, will be held online from 7 – 12 June. Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL) researchers give us an insight into how important and special this event actually is.

The Disticha Catonis by Catenaccio of Anagni. A text in vernacular from Latium (late 13th - early 14th century)

This dissertation provides a comprehensive overview of the grammar of Bantawa, a Kiranti (Rai) language spoken in Eastern Nepal.

This dissertation provides a formal description of the relationship between diatopic/diachronic micro-variation and phonologization through analysis of the phonetic/phonological properties of unstressed vowel reduction and vowel insertion in two Northern Italian dialects.

The main question of this research project concerns the extent to which light verbs in West Germanic languages participate in processes of language change.

This project investigates the influence that Arabic (esp. dialectal Arabic) has had on the Berber languages of Northern Africa.

Descriptions of different languages help us understand what speakers of different languages share worldwide. At the same time, having descriptions of languages available can also change local education and open our eyes to cultural and linguistic diversity. But what if a language has not yet been (fully)…

In September 2013 I moved to Leiden from the UK to take up the position of Assistant Professor covering politics and international relations on the BA Russian Studies and International Studies programmes and the MA Russian and Eurasian Studies.

This project examines how speakers store and process regular pitch variation.

On February 20th, Gulnaz Sibgatullina succesfully defended her doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Gulnaz on this great result.

On the 23rd of January, Anastasiia Ionova successfully defended her doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Anastasiia on this achievement.

The current project aims to revive the idea that sound inventories are structured according to a small set of universal principles by applying insights from current phonological theory and by making use of modern database technologies and data assessing methodologies.

This grammar describes Sumerian, an ancient Near Eastern language which was spoken in what is now southern Iraq, on the basis of written sources dating from about 2500 to 2000 BC.

The 10th edition of the World Congress of African Linguists (WOCAL), hosted by Leiden University, will be held online from 7 – 12 June. Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL) researchers give us an insight into how important and special this event actually is.

In QS’s World University Rankings of 2016, Leiden University’s History and Linguistics programme rank #19 and #28, respectively. This makes the History programme the best of its kind in the Netherlands, and Linguistics the second best.