The master’s programme in Dutch linguistics at Leiden University provides you with a deep understanding of the Dutch language and the multifaceted research into the structure and use of the Dutch language. During the programme you will not only gain in-depth knowledge of Dutch linguistics, but also…

Team History of Africa and the Americas

French Language and Linguistics at Leiden University offers a wide array of courses covering theoretical and applied linguistics, including language acquisition, syntax, and semantics.

English Language and Linguistics at Leiden University focuses on English language usage and linguistics around the world, including in countries where English is spoken as a second language or as part of a mixed language.

Italian Language and Linguistics at Leiden University draws on diachronic and synchronic perspectives to bring you an advanced qualification in Italian linguistics.

The topic of Historical Linguistics and Philology at LUCL is language change in its broadest sense.

What categories exist in the languages of pastoralists? Do these semantic concepts reflect universal or languagespecific tendencies? What (environment? culture?) governs the similarities (or the differences) attested crosslinguistically in cattle colour systems?

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

Are you thinking about studying Linguistics Research MA? Learn more and watch the introduction video.

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

Platform for research about heritage languages spoken in the Netherlands

The Great Rift Valley in Africa is a real treasure trove for discovering early human fossils. The fossils found in this part of Africa have determined our view of human evolution. But was the Great Rift Valley really the place where evolution took place or just a place where fossils are well preserved…

Psycholinguistic research

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

This project investigates the causes of the major archaeological change in the period of 40.000-20.000 BC in South Africa.

Reconstructing language history and prehistory in the context of the Indo-European language family.

The history of sign languages of deaf people is severely understudied. The historical linguistics of sign languages offers a fundamentally new perspective on the history of human languages. This project addresses the dearth of knowledge about historical sign language linguistics through a large-scale…

Describing a new language for the first time is an exciting and challenging intellectual experience.

By drawing on the personal experiences of contributors based in different institutions and countries, the articles in this special issue provide a fairly broad overview of ethics practices and concerns in different localities (though not globally, as we had originally hoped), showing, as one student…

The studies outlined in this volume explore how connectedness continues to change Africa and how Africa continues to shape the social life of connections.

Investigating specific language and speech behaviour of people.

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.

Almost all languages of Europe and of a large part of western Asia belong to a single language family, which is called Indo-European, and which includes modern languages like English, Dutch, Russian, Farsi, but also ancient ones like Ancient Greek, Latin, Hittite and Sanskrit.

This project examines the notion of sacred fertility and sacred landscapes, associated rituals and material culture, both archaeological and ethnographic manifestations in the Horn of Africa.

VODAN Africa started as a platform to enable access to critical data needed from Africa to fight the novel COVID-19. The initiative was inspired by the experience from the Liberia Ebola Virus outbreak in 2014: early detection requires contact tracing. Inclusion of the most vulnerable is critical to…

On December 5th, Matthias Pache succesfully defended his doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Matthias on this great result.

The Leiden University Network for Health in Africa (LUNHA) aims to shift the focus of global health to be more about justice, fairness, and inclusion.

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

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.

This study seeks to partially fill the knowledge gap about national culture in Africa, basing its research on data on ethnolinguistic groups (instead of administrative regions).

History of Africa and the Americas

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

This monograph by Robert Ross provides a detailed narrative of the Kat River Settlement in the Eastern Cape of South Africa during the nineteenth century.

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 2026 offers a varied program of introductory as well as more advanced courses in Anatolian, Classics, Descriptive Linguistics, Language Documentation, Eastern Christianity, Germanic, General Linguistics, Historical Linguistics, Indo-European, Indology,…

Covering all seven countries on the isthmus, this volume presents the first collection of original linguistic studies on Central American Spanish varieties, which have long been neglected in Hispanic Linguistics.

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 project aims to systematically investigate the influence of information structure on nominal licensing in a subset of Bantu languages.

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.

This project investigates how inhabitants of Leiden with a migratory background experience the extent to which their language and cultural background is welcomed in Dutch society and how this affects their identity, sense of belonging, and general wellbeing.

This research project seeks to understand the dynamics in the relationship between social media, mobile telephony and the social fabric under duress in Africa's mobile margins. It combines studies on mobility/migration, conflict and communication in an attempt to uncover these new dynamics, which have…

The aim of the project is to contribute to the process of archive formation ongoing in Post-Apartheid South Africa through the inclusion of photographs that have been either unacknowledged or excised from the national canon.

In this book, Lydie Cabane examines the history of disaster management in South Africa.

This project aims at providing a broad perspective of the state of Science Technology and Innovation (STI) in Africa with a focus on global funding flows, in order to inform research funders in the continent, in particular those participating in the Science Granting Councils Initiative (SGCI). The project…

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…

This project will study the influence of Arabic, Iberian, and Italian representations of Africa, as well as the impact of local African knowledge, on Dutch imaginations which were public in nature, and thus affected a shared European understanding of African alterity.

This project uses archaeological, literary and epigraphic evidence to investigate urban development in Roman-period North Africa, compiling this in a GIS-linked database in order to analyse the development of urban settlement spatially over time.