Lecture, Sociolinguistics Series

That's just learning parrot-fashion. This was the argument with which the proposal to establish a language lab at Leiden University was rejected in 1962. But six years later, the language lab was launched. And now the Academic Language Lab is celebrating its 50-year anniversary.

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

Dr Jenny Doetjes was appointed Professor of Semantics and Language Variation in February. During her professorship Dr. Doetjes wishes to focus on charting linguistic patterns between languages that, at first glance, seem to have little to do with each other.

This study analyses the prehistory of a northeastern Siberian population, the Sakha, from both a molecular-genetic and a linguistic perspective.

Tijmen Baarda defended his PhD thesis on 8 January 2020

Providers of telephone, internet or data centers can be seen as companies of vital importance because of their national importance. This comes as no surprise. In the Netherlands, additional legislation was deemed necessary to protect national security and a legislative proposal was presented in April…

Comparison between babies and song-birds when they are learning a non-existent language—a study of this kind has never been tried before. But this is what Claartje Levelt, Carel ten Cate (Leiden University) and Jelle Zuidema (University of Amsterdam) are attempting.

Operators in the Lexicon opens with an old chestnut: why are there no natural single word lexicalizations for negations of the propositional operator and and the predicate calculus operator all: why neither *nand nor *nall?

Workshop

The human brain stores not only individual words, but also all kinds of abstract information about these words. Research by Leiden linguists has shown that speakers have ready access to this information.

The project

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.

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…

This dissertation provides a grammatical description of Ghomara Berber, a Berber language spoken in North-West Morocco by about 10.000 people. The grammar consists of a description of the phonology, the morphology and the syntax. In the appendices a number of texts and a wordlist are included. The data…

“BABYLON” investigates the extent of the similarities between Babylonian and post-exilic forms of cultic and social organization and explores the question how Babylonian models could have influenced the restoration effort in Jerusalem.

It may well be that only male zebra finches can sing, but the females are faster at learning to discriminate sounds. Leiden researchers publish their findings in the scientific journal Animal Behaviour.

International scholarly publisher Brill has released the most complete and up-to-date reference work on the Chinese language available today. Prof.dr. Rint Sybesma oversaw the project as Editor-in-Chief.

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.

Language research generates a wealth of information about people: from our history and cultural differences to the way we learn. Leiden University shares its knowledge and passion for this topic via de MOOC on ‘Miracles of Human Languages’ and the web dossier on Language Diversity.

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.

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

On 1 February 2014 the second issue of the Journal of the LUCAS Graduate Conference, titled 'Death: Ritual, Representation and Remembrance', was published.

Important dates in the Academic Language Centre calendar.

How might viola and string quartet playing in the performer-centered, moment-to-moment and communicative style heard on early recordings be brought about today?

LUCL is glad to announce that two of its members have been awarded an NWO Vrije Competitie Grant.

Nathalie Brusgaard has won second prize (€ 2.000) in the Leiden University Thesis Prizes 2015 with her thesis 'The Social Significance of Cattle in Bronze Age North-Western Europe'

Leiden is to have a new language museum in 2015, a public institute focusing on language in all its facets and where science and social developments come together for a broad public. It won't be in a building, but at different places in the city. Dynamic, contemporary, flexible and affordable. The details…

Our next Keynote speaker interview is with Kristin Lemhöfer from the Radboud University in Nijmegen, Netherlands.

What languages do you speak? According to Felienne Hermans, ‘Python’ could be an answer to this question. Hermans studies how people learn to program at the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS) of Leiden University. In an article of the NewScientist she explains why programming is similar…

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…

In the Bachelor Honours Class ‘The Noble Art and Tricky Business of Translation’, Honours students learn about the tricky business of translation. To gain hands-on experience, students had to translate a poem for the seminar on poetry. For some translators-to-be, one language was simply not enough.