Niels Schoubben is a postdoctoral researcher in the ERC project “The Silk Road Language Web” (PI: Prof. dr. Michaël Peyrot). As a linguist-cum-philologist, he studies the written remains of extinct Central Asian languages in order to uncover words and grammatical patterns borrowed from one ancient language into the other. His first monograph (based on his 2024 Leiden PhD dissertation) is a study of language contact between Niya Prakrit (a form of Gāndhārī) and Bactrian. Currently, his main research focus lies on Gāndhārī loanwords into Khotanese.

More information about Niels Schoubben

Fields of interest

• Historical linguistics
• Language contact
• Philology
• Sanskrit and Middle Indo-Aryan (Prakrit)
• Old and Middle Iranian
• Tocharian
• Ancient and Medieval Greek

Research 

Currently, I am a postdoctoral researcher at Leiden University, where I am part of the ERC project “The Silk Road Language Web” (PI: Michaël Peyrot). Having a background in classics, Indology, and comparative philology, I study South and Central Asian languages and texts dating to the first millennium before and after the start of the common era. At the moment, I am working on a study of the Indo-Aryan loanwords in (Old) Khotanese, with a particular focus on loanwords from Gāndhārī and other Prakrits. Before taking up my current position, I wrote my doctoral dissertation on “Traces of language contact: Bactrian and other foreign elements”, also at Leiden University. This work has been awarded the first prize of the Society for Indo-European Studies for the best PhD thesis of 2025. A revised version of it has been published as an Open Access monograph in the Abhandlungen für die Kunde des Morgenlandes, Harrassowitz Verlag. Further academic interests include Indian religions and literature, textual criticism, Greek grammatical treatises from the Byzantine period, and the history of 19th- and 20th-century philological scholarship.

CV

Grants and awards 

• 2026: Best PhD thesis in Indo-European Linguistics 2025. Awarded by the Indogermanische Gesellschaft.
• 2021: Best MA thesis in Indo-European Linguistics 2020. Awarded by the Indogermanische Gesellschaft.
• 2018: Best MA thesis in Classics 2017-2018 at Ghent University. Awarded by the Ghent Institute for Classical Studies (GIKS).

Selected publications

• Schoubben, N. 2026. Traces of language contact in Niya Prakrit. Bactrian and other foreign elements (= Abhandlungen für die Kunde des Morgenlandes 146). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, xxiv + 584 pages.
• Schoubben, N. 2025 [2026]. ‘Gāndhārī Light on Eastern Middle Iranian and Vice Versa: Three New Examples.’ In C. Ching and M. Peyrot (eds.), Text, script and language in Bactria and Serindia: Papers on cultural and linguistic interactions in pre-Islamic Central Asia (= Beiträge zur Iranistik 55). Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag, 297–319.
• Schoubben, N. 2025. ‘Khotanese varga- ‘fruit (of an action)’: A Buddhist term borrowed from Bactrian.’ Indo-Iranian Journal, 68(4), 311–329.
• Schoubben, N. 2025. ‘Animacy, postpositions, and the spatial cases in Niya Prakrit.’ Journal of South Asian Languages and Linguistics, 12(2), 87–119.
• Schoubben, N., J. Koning, B. van Velthoven and P. Probert. 2023. ‘Of tortoise necks and dialects: A new edition of the Grammaticus Leidensis.’ Byzantinische Zeitschrift, 116(3), 929–964.

Publications