Studying one another’s languages and cultures fosters understanding between groups of people, which leads to more equality, along with increased economic, administrative, and cultural cooperation.

Lecture, LUCL Colloquium

Lecture, Comparative Indo-European Linguistics (CIEL) Seminars

The project investigates how bilingual speakers navigate lexico-syntactic features, including grammatical gender, classifier systems, and the linear order of adjectives and nouns, across Spanish and Chinese in both unilingual and bilingual contexts.

This PhD project investigates the distribution and interpretation of quantity expressions in relation to the mass/count distinction cross-linguistically.

Conference

This PhD project investigates the argumentative-rhetorical strategies by which the Russian state attempts to substantiate the legitimacy of its war against Ukraine.

The project investigates epistemicity: how the knowledge of the speaker and hearer can be expressed in the grammar. This shows us how speakers organise their knowledge, and whether this is influenced by the language they speak.

This project investigates the sources of variability in prosody comprehension.

This PhD project investigates how nationalist ideas are expressed, shaped, and negotiated in Moroccan Malhun poetry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

This project investigates how sign languages change and spread over time, and how this is influenced by their transmission history.

All languages use melody in speech, primarily via rises and falls of the pitch of voice. Such pitch variation is pervasive, offering a wide spectrum of nuance to sentences – an additional layer of meaning. For example, saying “yes” with a rising pitch implies a question (rather than an affirmation).…

This PhD project investigates the different uses of Mandarin

Conference

This project investigates properties of quantity expressions across languages from the perspective of how quantity is represented in the human brain.

This project investigates (1) how the strategies used in expressing epistemicity differ in their interpretation and use; (2) which strategies can combine and to what effects this leads; (3) what the expression of (various aspects of) epistemicity tell us about how the languages encode the speaker’s…

On the 19th of November, Tingting Zheng successfully defended a doctoral thesis. Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Tingting on this achievement!

Conference

This PhD project investigates the forms, functions, meanings, and socio-cultural values embedded in Palenda, in order to understand how it reflects and shapes the worldview of the Muna people (Mieno Wuna) through metaphor.

This PhD project investigates the different ways in which honorific forms are used in Japanese other than to express politeness, and how different factors affect perceptions about these uses.

How does Russia use propaganda and what characterises Russian propaganda in terms of language and argumentation?

When and how was alphabetic writing introduced to Greece and the wider Mediterranean region?

On the 16th of December, Yachan Liang successfully defended a doctoral thesis. Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Yachan on this achievement!

A linguistic prehistory of the Tarim Basin in Northwest China

This PhD project investigates the historical and sociolinguistic factors that have influenced the emergence of local sign languages in Mozambique. It examines how these factors have shaped the Deaf signing community and contributed to the development of a national sign language that incorporates borrowings…

This PhD project investigates the impacts of recognition of sign languages on communication and instruction for deaf learners in primary schools in Uganda.

Lecture, Comparative Indo-European Linguistics (CIEL) Seminars

The project focusses on how US views of the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia influenced its strategic interpretations of the region. Being eleven million strong, dispersed across the region and sharing ethnic ties with Communist China, interpretations of the diaspora intersected with key Cold War…

This project looks at the Ancient Greek language from the perspective of the ordinary writer. A large corpus of more than 60.000 Greek texts on papyrus, from private letters to petitions and contracts, offers an excellent opportunity to study the Greek language as written by non-literary writers in…

This PhD project mainly investigates in what way (i.e., serial or parallel mode or other mode) the parser processes the Mandarin Chinese. In addition, are there any specific linguistic features governing the decoding of Mandarin Chinese that are different from other languages? Are there any processing…

On the 17th of December, Jin Wang successfully defended a doctoral thesis. Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Jin on this achievement!

This PhD project investigates how grammatical features and lexical elaboration in Fulfulde Juguureere reflect aspects of cattle culture.

On the 16th of December, Ruixue Wu successfully defended a doctoral thesis. Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Ruixue on this achievement!

This PhD project investigates specific types of allusions used by Russian native speakers, namely references to classical Russian literature. The research includes the analysis of 1) how native speakers use allusions, 2) what type of discourse allusions are frequently used, and 3) how we can implement…

It is often claimed—in both scholarly and popular sources—that guide dogs for the blind are a modern innovation. But as this project demonstrates clearly, guide dogs also existed during the medieval period.

This project creates a comprehensive audiovisual documentation of the Sanye language, the sociolinguistic situation, and cultural practices of the Sanye (Dahalo) community in coastal Kenya.

By documenting lexical and morpho-syntactic patterns among P’urhepecha speakers in Mexico and the US diaspora, this project will investigate the sources of language variation. The ensuing online dialect atlas will serve as an online resource for speakers, learners and researchers of the language.

This PhD project investigates what the universal and variable morphosyntactic properties of linguistic expressions of otherness are and how they can be modelled theoretically.

WORLDING AMERICA researches how ‘play’ has been a key force in the past and present process of creating America as a coherent and hegemonic ‘world,’ from 1503 to the present.

When we read a text, we think we know who wrote it, but in the early modern period, manuscript production was often a collaborative or ‘socialised’ enterprise involving secretaries and scribes who physically wrote what the author dictated.

How did people across Central and Eastern Europe imagine the future during the transitions of the 1980s and 1990s? The umbrella term ‘post-communism’ does not provide an answer to this question. This project explores how writers and cultural theorists saw the potential future of their societies during…

From ca. 1540 to 1600, thousands fled the war-stricken Southern Low Countries to the British Isles, Germany, and the Northern Low Countries. Research on this displacement crisis, central to the formation of the Netherlands and Belgium, reflects 21st-century debates on migration and language: language…

The number of books by U.S. authors released in China has drastically decreased in recent years. Assistant professor Svetlana Kharchenkova wrote an article about this for the Diplomat.

Since the 16th century, religious concerns have motivated the study of Old English and its speakers. In the 19th century, scholars turned to the study of Old English literature in particular to find traces of pre-Christian, ‘Germanic’ religion, as discussed in Eric G. Stanley’s seminal work The Search…

The BOCA project explores new forms of communicating academic knowledge as a way to strengthen the connection between the university and society.

The NWO-funded Vidi project “American foreign policy and liberalism” challenges the idea that the United States has created and sustained a “liberal international order” since World War II. It instead explores the ways in which illiberal ideologies – such as those underpinning racial hierarchy at home…

When it comes to languages and cultures, Leiden University is the university. The global expertise present places our university at the top. In Leiden and The Hague, we study languages and cultures from all regions of the world and from prehistory to the present day. In this way we create a broad view…

How did nineteenth-century non-Anglophone translators and authors creatively engage with the poem Beowulf?

In a packed Stadsgehoorzaal, philosopher and Member of the Senate Daan Roovers delivered the 54th Huizinga Lecture. It was a passionate plea for a form of politics thatt is not only about winning, but also about talking and playing.

In the 19th century, Old English poems were claimed as cultural heritage by various non-Anglophone nations, including Scandinavians, Germans and Dutch. These competing nationalistic, cultural appropriations happened against the backdrop of a growing interest in early medieval English language and literature…