This edited book presents case-studies and reflections on the role of languages and their analytic study in development practices across four regions: Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Pacific.

The linguistic project constitutes the connection between the two other subprojects. It consists of two parts.

The Latin language is a descendant of the widespread Indo-European family of languages. Recent ancient genetic studies have helped shed light on the likelihood that the Indo-European languages spread into a Europe that had already been populated by farmers for thousands of years.

Linguistic Choices in the Contemporary City focuses on how individuals navigate conversation in highly diversified contexts and provides a broad overview of state of the art research in urban sociolinguistics across the globe.

The Leiden Summer School in Languages and Linguistics offers a varied program of specialised courses in Descriptive linguistics, in Chinese, Germanic, Indo-European, Indian, Iranian, Semitic languages and linguistics, as well as a number of introductory linguistic courses.

Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL) is one of seven institutes housed within the Faculty of Humanities.

Humanities, Centre for Linguistics

So far it has been impossible to compare large sets of syntactic constructions in large sets of languages systematically and automatically. The online availability of parallel text corpora and software tools to align, enrich, search and analyse them has the potential to make automatic massive systematic…

Study information

Lecture, Special Topics in Dialectology (2023)

This project aims to open up the pre-Islamic linguistic history of Arabia through the systematic study of the Thamudic inscriptions within a digital humanities framework.

Language Use, Usage Guides and Linguistic Norms will be of interest to scholars of language use in both the past and the present, as well as to anyone interested in the interplay between actual language use and prescriptive attitudes towards language.

This thesis describes the use of the evolutionary approach in the study of language change, aiming to provide a better insight in the mechanisms that play a role in language change and to validate this approach in the field of language change.

Lecture, Applied African Linguistics

Lecture

On the 16th of February, Yunus Sulistyono successfully defended a doctoral thesis. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Yunus on this achievement!

This project investigates the rich linguistic history of the crucial language groups in East Africa and includes a search for words that indicate earlier lost languages. These outcomes, combined with recent archaeological and genetic research, will contribute to a new understanding of East Africa’s…

The policies relating to language pursued by European monarchies and states have been widely studied, but far less attention has been given to their linguistic and cultural policies in territories outside their own borders.

Humanities, Centre for Linguistics

This project seeks to close the gap between the three main players in the field of prescriptivism: the linguists themselves, the prescriptivists (as writers of usage guides) and those who depend upon such manuals.

Humanities, Centre for Linguistics

Study information

On the 16th of February 2022 Mr. Yunus Sulistyono successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

This thesis discusses the development in Proto–Indo–European, Latin and Romance of a word–formation pattern which the most adequate terminology in use dubs ‘verbal government compounds with a governing first member’; I use the shorthand ‘pickpocket compounds’.

Fokelien Kootstra defended her thesis on 23 April 2019

This project intends to provide an integrated linguistic assessment of the hypothesised migration route of the Tocharians.

For a brief period Leiden University was the hub of the world of linguistics. The 48th annual conference of the Societas Linguistica Europaea was held here at the start of September. Almost 600 linguists came from all corners of the world to the city of discoveries to attend this prestigious event.

On November 1st, Min Liu succesfully defended her doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Min on this great result.

Nowadays, most Europeans speak a language belonging to the Indo-European language family. However, very different languages were spoken on our continent before the arrival of the Indo-Europeans. The EUROLITHIC project tries to find answers to the question which languages these were and where they came…

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

Humanities, Centre for Linguistics

Form and Function in Greek Grammar. Linguistic Contributions to the Study of Greek Literature is a new book, written by Albert Rijksbaron. Rijksbaron is internationally known as one of the leading scholars of the Ancient Greek language, whose work has exerted a strong and lasting influence on the scholarly…

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…

This dissertation investigates the interaction of aspect and subjectivity in modal constructions.

Which features characterize speakers’ voices, and how are these features determined by what a speaker is saying?

Lecture, Interactionality seminars

Lecture

This project aims at documenting the Haitian Creole varieties spoken by Haitian migrants in Cuba and the Dominican Republic’s Samaná Peninsula.

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

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 presents a full descriptive account of the grammar of Mualang, covering the major features of phonology and morphosyntax as well as issues related to pragmatics.

The project aims at highlighting and strengthening Dutch research into the diversity of the world’s languages from a historic and a cognitive perspective.

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

Migration is not only reflected in DNA, but also in language. By tracing changes in language, we learn more about the lifestyle of the people that speak it. University lecturer Tijmen Pronk (40) conducts linguistic research into (pre)historical migration.

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.