This thesis investigates the connection between tonal realization and tone change (tone sandhi) in Wenzhou Chinese, and whether and how such a connection is conditioned by prosodic structure and focus marking.

There is not a day without language: we use it to read, to write, to communicate. But do you ever wonder how you learned to speak your own language when you were a child? And how, as an adult, do you learn new languages? Linguistics has the answer to those questions. In the BA Linguistics at Leiden…

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

Investigating specific language and speech behaviour of people.

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…

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

When researching languages in historical context, our goal is to understand the nature of linguistic variation in the past, and explain the extent to which the socio-cultural context of bygone times contributed to shaping linguistic variation and change.

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

This dissertation provides an overview of the phonological developments of the Qinghai-Gansu languages, comparing them to the reconstructed ancestral language.

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.

Computational linguistics uses computational methods to help answer linguistics questions across a variety of topics.

Geesteswetenschappen, Centre for Linguistics

The goal of the field of Applied Linguistics is to apply the findings and the techniques from research in linguistics to solve practical language-related problems in society.

Theoretical linguistics seeks to understand the underlying principles of the nature of human language.

How did common people write in the late eighteenth century? Little is yet known on this topic, since our knowledge is mainly based on printed texts written by a small part of the (male) elite population. This dissertation – written from a sociolinguistic point of view – gives us new insights into late-…

LIAS researchers working in the field of linguistics hold dual appointments in LIAS and the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL).

Documenting and describing languages of the world.

Applying linguistics research to solve practical language-related problems in society.

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

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…

Bringing together scholars from a broad range of theoretical perspectives, The Language of Argumentation offers a unique overview of research at the crossroads of linguistics and theories of argumentation.

The goal of the MODOMA-project is to create a computer model of language acquisition.

Studying the underlying principles of the nature of language.

The research programme Formal Theoretical and Experimental Linguistics brings together LUCL researchers who focus mainly on formal theoretical and experimental linguistics.

I am Nargess Asghari. I came to the Netherlands in 2017 to study Linguistics at Leiden University. I wrote my pre-master’s and master’s theses on Iranian Sign Language and Berbey Sign Language (an emerging family sign language in the village of Berbey, Mali), respectively, under the supervision of Dr.…

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

On the 23rd of September, George Saad successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates George on this achievement!

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 climate crisis, the return of TB and the digitisation of cultural heritage. The Netherlands and Indonesia face many of the same challenges. A visit by a delegation from Leiden University to Indonesia at the end of June highlighted the benefits of cooperation.

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

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.

In this dissertation, electrophysiological (EEG) and behavioural measures are used to investigate how allophonic tonal variants and sub-phonemic features are processed during Mandarin and Dutch speech production, visual processing of written words and reading aloud.

The Linguistics specialisation is a one-year programme within the master's degree in Linguistics at Leiden University. In the course of the programme you will be able to focus on a specific thematic or disciplinary route, reflecting the linguistics expertise present at Leiden University.

The Leiden HANDS!Lab for Sign Languages and Deaf Studies hosts research activities in the area of sign language linguistics and Deaf studies, with a focus on Africa. In addition to various research projects, we have our Deaf studies lecture Series in International Sign and offer various regular and…

The main goal of this project is to answer the question: how did Dutch acquire its own, distinctive linguistic characteristics?

Geesteswetenschappen, Centre for Linguistics

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

The research master’s programme in Linguistics at Leiden University combines leading expertise with a flexible programme format.

Studievoorlichting, Online Experience

A thorough description of the relationships among languages and their social environment in a given context, reflecting an ecological perspective, involves attention to the agency of local actors, and the policies, discourse, and ideologies that surround them.

This thesis attempts to describe the entire corpus of Latino-Punic inscriptions, found in Tripolitania.

Reconstructing language history of individual languages (English, Italian, Russian) or language branches (Germanic, Slavic) by studying ancient written sources.

The aim of the project is to unravel the genetic and contact relations between the indigenous languages of Mesoamerica (Mexico and western Central America) and the Middle Andes region (Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia), as part of a larger endeavor to understand the historical process of the peopling of the Americas…

Platform for research about heritage languages spoken in the Netherlands

Reconstructing language history through the study of language change.

In the master’s programme in Dutch Language, Culture and Society at Leiden University you will study the language and culture of the Netherlands from the Dutch Golden Age – the time of Rembrandt and Vondel – until today’s dynamic and muliticultural society.

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

Psycholinguistic research

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.