On October 9th, Peter Alexander Kerkhof succesfully defended his doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Peter Alexander on this great result.

This dissertation focuses on irregular patterns in Vedic Grammar and Poetry.

On the 6th of July, Anthony Jakob successfully defended a doctoral thesis. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Anthony on this achievement!

If you want to follow a full academic programme, the next step after obtaining your bachelor’s is a master’s degree (MA) at a Dutch or international university. And there may be no better place for your further master’s study than Leiden University!

Within the Linguistics specialisation, you can choose one of the suggested thematic routes. Depending on the theme of your choice, the programme prepares you for a career in various fields, such as speech technology, artificial intelligence, education, language documentation and language policy.

Languages spoken around the world differ vastly from  the more familiar Indo-European languages. The courses in this theme aim to introduce you to the immense linguistic diversity still found in the world today. 

At LUCL, researchers aim to contribute to a comprehensive and informed perspective on the human past.

On the 1st of November, Andrew Wigman successfully defended a doctoral thesis. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Andrew on this achievement!

Conference, Comparative Indo-European Linguistics (CIEL) Seminars

The Erasmus+ programme supports both incoming and outgoing staff mobilities within Europe, either for training or for teaching. On this webpage some participants of the programme share their experiences.

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.

In this dissertation, the life account is constructed of of the founder of Bon Religion, Shenrab Miwo.

The aim of this dissertation is to present a critical edition of kāṇḍa 15 of the Paippalādasaṁhitā (PS) of the Atharvaveda.

Research at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL) focuses on linguistic variation and diversity. In order to create more awareness and scientific understanding of this topic, research activities are clustered around six (overlapping) umbrella programmes. Many of our researchers are active…

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. The Summer School takes…

How does the human mind work when it comes to language? Why are some speeches totally persuasive, and others less so? How do children acquire language so effortlessly? How do languages develop over the course of time? How many different speech sounds can humans make? During your BA in Linguistics you…

In the first year, the Linguistics programme will provide you with a sound basis for specialisation, while training your academic competences. In the second year, you will choose one of our four specialisations. While focusing on this track in your second and third year, you may also choose electives…

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’.

This dissertation provides a thorough review of the words belonging to the oldest layer of Germanic loanwords in Proto-Slavic and answers the question of how these words were adapted to the Proto-Slavic accentual system.

This work sets out to investigate the form and function of the imperative in the Rigveda. The morphology (and, where relevant, etymology), syntax and semantics of the imperative are covered.

This dissertation provides a grammatical description of the Awjila language, a small Berber language spoken in the Libyan oasis of Awjila.

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

Four scientists from Leiden University have each been awarded a Starting Grant by the European Research Council (ERC). This grant, worth up to two million euros, gives researchers the opportunity to head up a research team for five years.

Below are some of the scholarly works published within the context of the Institutions for Conflict Resolution programme.

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 as 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 University…

Leids onderzoek naar bestraffing komt tot stand uit verschillende disciplines. Het onderzoeksproject kent een juridische, criminologische, sociaalwetenschappelijke en filosofische invalshoek.

Dutch Studies is a unique bachelor’s programme in which you will quickly acquire fluency in spoken and written Dutch at a high academic level, at the same time gaining deep understanding of the culture and history of the Netherlands.

For decades, scholars have wondered about the development and dissemination of languages around the world. What are the odds that peoples living thousands of miles apart speak varieties of Indo-European languages that are closely related? This riddle has now partly been solved thanks to an international…

Sasha Lubotsky, professor of Comparative Indo-European Linguistics, and Ineke Sluiter, professor of Classical languages and culture, have been appointed members of the Academia Europaea.

Shifting the Compass: Pluricontinental Connections in Dutch Colonial and Postcolonial Literature

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

ELS lab member Helen Pluut concluded this year’s lecture series on Empirical Methods in Legal Research. Helen discussed diary studies as an example of multilevel research designs.

Research shows that including administrative fines in the screening process for a Certificate of Conduct (in Dutch: VOG) is not currently feasible.

Er is een nijpend cellen- en personeelstekort in Nederlandse gevangenissen. En dit is niet voor de eerste keer. Miranda Boone, hoogleraar criminologie en vergelijkende penologie, sprak met Trouw over de problematiek: ‘Het aantal gevangenen is het resultaat van beleid.’

Michaël Peyrot is elected member of the Young Academy of Europe (YAE: http://yacadeuro.org).

Linguists Alwin Kloekhorst and Alexander Lubotsky from Leiden University made a great discovery this summer. They deciphered a few dozen inscriptions on pot shards found in Daskyleion (North-West Turkey) as Phrygian and Lydian, and thus proved the presence of the Phrygians and Lydians in that area.

The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL) aims to demonstrate its relevance to society by means of high-quality research, excellent education and various outreach activities. A few highlights:

The research programme Descriptive and Comparative Linguistics brings together LUCL researchers who focus mainly on descriptive and comparative linguistics.

NWO has awarded eleven Leiden researchers a Vidi grant of 800,000 euros. The research subjects range from Cicero and muscle dystrophy to the archaeology of bogs.

Lecture, Comparative Indo-European Linguistics (CIEL) Seminars

The Etymology Calendar for 2020, which was compiled by five linguistics students from Leiden University, has now hit the shops. After the resounding success of the first Etymology Calendar last year, this year’s version is being published by big-name publishing house Brill.