In the Bachelor Honours Class ‘The Noble Art and Tricky Business of Translation’, Honours students learn about the tricky business of translation. To gain hands-on experience, students had to translate a poem for the seminar on poetry. For some translators-to-be, one language was simply not enough.

Japanese was not always the language spoken in Japan. Researchers link the arrival of the language in Japan with the migration of farmers around 400 BC. Linguist Elisabeth de Boer has been awarded an ERC Starting Grant to carry out research on the further spread of the language in Japan.

Author and political scientist Mounir Samuel has spent recent years delving into the many ways that language can exclude people and bring them together.

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.

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

Noah Millman defended his thesis on 26 May 2015

Marietje Beemsterboer defended her thesis on 12 June 2018 (in Dutch)

On 14 September 2021, Bram van der Sar defended his thesis 'Fiscale geheimhoudingsplicht: art. 67 AWR ontrafeld'. The doctoral research was supervised by Prof. J.P. Boer and Prof. A.O. Lubbers.

In this research project child language phonology is studied from the perspective of a psycholinguistic speech-production model and this model is in turn studied from the perspective of developmental phonology.

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

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.

The current project aims to revive the idea that sound inventories are structured according to a small set of universal principles by applying insights from current phonological theory and by making use of modern database technologies and data assessing methodologies.

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).…

Taal als sleutel tot het begrijpen van de mens.

The ‘empathic mind’ in children with Specific Language Impairments (SLI); what can children with SLI understand of other people’s minds and emotions?

In comparing a selection of 18th-century histories to a representative sample of 19th-century histories of science, this project inquires: Which early modern vices persisted into the 19th century and to what extent were those vices embodied in anecdotes, conveyed through commonplaces, or symbolically…

Haunted Europe offers a comprehensive account of the British and Irish fascination with a Gothic vision of continental Europe, tracing its effect on British intellectual life from the birth of the Gothic novel, to the eve of Brexit, and the symbolic recalibration of the UK’s relationship to mainland…

Operators in the Lexicon opens with an old chestnut: why are there no natural single word lexicalizations for negations of the propositional operator and and the predicate calculus operator all: why neither *nand nor *nall?

This project analyzes to what extent hodegetical textbooks relied on each other in warning their readers against vicious habits, how much continuity their catalogs of vice displayed, and to what extent vices that persisted throughout the 18th and 19th centuries were associated with easy-to-remember…

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.

This dissertation aims at discussing the nature and the linguistic factors assumed responsible for speech intelligibility problems of Sudanese learners of English.

HERLING (Research Lab for the Study of Heritage Languages of the Netherlands) is a new centre that aims to bridge the gap between scientific research and language communities.

This project investigates the sources of variability in prosody comprehension.

Stylianos Irakleous defended his thesis on 6 February 2020

A fascinating description of a global language, A Grammar of Mandarin by Jeroen Wiedenhof combines broad perspectives with illuminating depth.

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.

A synchronic description of the endangered Slovene dialect spoken in the Gailtal valley in Carinthia, Austria.

The University of Bologna organizes a Summer School in Classical Languages, offering intensive courses in Latin and/or Greek (20 June – 23 July 2022). The deadline for applications is: 10 June 2022.

The Trojan War plays an important role in Greek mythology. But there is much more to Troy than mythology. The exhibition ‘Troy. City. Homer. Turkey’ can be viewed from 7 December to 5 May 2013. Leiden linguist Alwin Kloekhorst wrote an article for the exhibition catalogue on the language of Troy.

The present project aims to provide valuable insights for the professional development of international teachers, and also for improving the quality of foreign language education.

The aim of this thesis was to develop and evaluate a Ecological Professional Development Model to support preservice biology teachers to direct their own subject-specific ecological professional development route.

On 18 November 2021, Anneke Keulemans defended the thesis 'Het Unierechtelijke verdedigingsbeginsel'. The doctoral research was supervised by Prof. J.P. Boer and Prof. A.O. Lubbers.

Our language is adapted to the context in which we humans communicate. But computers ‘think’ differently. What would a language be like whose structure was optimally adjusted for use by humans and machines? Tessa Verhoef is trying to find the answer.

Lexicographical description of Greek; production of Greek-Dutch dictionary

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

From Sunday 11 till Tuesday 20 June 2023, NVIC organizes a new edition of the TAFL course. This intensive, interactive course is developed for (future) teachers of Arabic. It addresses both the practical aspects of teaching Arabic as a foreign language as well as the underlying linguistic and cognitive…

From Sunday 8 till Tuesday 17 January 2023, NVIC organizes a new edition of the TAFL course. This intensive, interactive course is developed for (future) teachers of Arabic. It addresses both the practical aspects of teaching Arabic as a foreign language as well as the underlying linguistic and cognitive…

Japanologist and linguist Martine Robbeets is going to use her newly acquired ERC Consolidator Grant to study the origins and spread of Trans-Eurasian languages, which include Japanese and Turkish. With it, she’s tackling one of the most controversial subjects in language history.

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.

The present study comprises a classification and analysis of the syntax of the non-verbal clause in Qumran Hebrew, i.e. the linguistic variety (or varieties) found in the so-called Dead Sea Scrolls. The corpus consists of the non-biblical texts written in Hebrew; biblical texts and texts written in…

This volume offers a multidisciplinary view of cutting-edge research on bilingualism in Spanish and Portuguese-speaking regions, with the aim of building a bridge between sub-fields and approaches that often find themselves isolated from one another.