On 26th and 27th February, the South African Minister of Science and Technology, Naledi Pandor will visit Leiden University as honorary Oort Visiting Professor of Astronomy for Development. She will give a ceremonial lecture on Astronomy for Development in the Academiegebouw on 26th February and lead…

A new study published in Archaeometry describes the unexpected results obtained from analyses of five human teeth discovered in a ritual cache at an enslaved African plantation site on the island of Saba in the Caribbean.

This book presents a comprehensive description of the grammar of Logba, one of the fourteen Ghana-Togo Mountain (GTM) languages spoken by approximately 7,500 speakers on the South-Eastern frontier of the Ghana-Togo border. It is the outcome of fifteen months research in Logba speaking communities.

Academic studies or an academic career are a big challenge if you are deaf. Particularly in Africa, where many countries don’t even have secondary schools for the deaf. A team of Leiden academics has organised the first summer school for and by deaf academics on the African continent, in Ghana. We spoke…

Is aggression always bad? PhD research by psychologist Simone Dobbelaar shows that it is not. In fact, children who occasionally fiercely defend themselves and stand up for their peers often feel better mentally.

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

Cette étude montre que le développement phonético-phonologique en fulfulde et bambara est à la foiscomparable au développement langagier dans d’autres langues du monde et influencé par les caractéristiques phonétiques et phonologiques de ces deux langues notamment au niveau de la phonotaxe.

What is the effect of a dynamic training in children’s inductive reasoning skills and how is it related to children’s school performances and language development.

Political scientists study topics that affect society, but their work often remains out of the spotlight. Not always: the research of Leiden political scientist Simon Otjes does have a visible impact.

A new publication that brings together perspectives on language contact phenomena across temporal and spatial dimensions.

This grammar presents an in-depth linguistic description of one Papuan Malay variety, based on fifteen hours of recordings of spontaneous narratives and conversations between Papuan Malay speakers.

Professor Jenny Doetjes at Leiden University researches similarities and differences in languages, specifically in the area of numerals and quantifiers. Her research provides insight into language patterns, bu also in the working of the human brain. Inaugural lecture on 26 January.

Nancy Kula has been Professor of African Linguistics since 1 February. Now is a good time to hear more about her field of expertise and academic interests.

What evaluative languages (errors, mistakes, vices, etc.) did book reviewers employ? To what extent and on what occasions did they invoke early modern vices? And to what extent did this differ across fields or change over the course of the century?

If idioms employed in codes of conduct could be as idiosyncratic as examples suggest, then to what extent did early modern language of vice, too, persist in this genre?

In this project, the hypothesis that language contact crucially impacts the development of spatial grammar and phonology is investigated.

Subproject of the ERC project 'Challenging the Liberal World Order from Within: The Invisible History of the United Nations and the Global South'.

A bloody civil war has raged for years in the Central African Republic. PhD candidate Crépin Mouguia points out a tragic pattern: young people have been recruited as fighters or soldiers for generations and thus fuel the conflicts.

This PhD project investigates how language models can be used to extract structured knowledge from text in a way that is accurate, robust, and applicable to real-world use cases.

Conference

LUNHA strives to redefine global health by prioritizing justice, fairness, and inclusion in Africa. Through collaboration with diverse stakeholders, LUNHA aims to reshape global health research and foster a broader engagement with social sciences and humanities.

This study looks at the diverse phonological systems found within Central Chadic, and reconstructs the phonological system of their ancestor language.

French title: Communication et violences dans le Guéra et le Moyen-Chari (Tchad) de 1940 à 2010. This research investigates the relationship between the introduction of new means of communication and violence experienced by the local populations in the Moyen-Chari and the Guéra regions in Chad from…

This thesis discusses the constructions relevant to Object Shift from the intonational perspective, by presenting experimental data from all the Scandinavian languages.

This publication aims at the analysis of the performance of a corpus of Fongbe stories that I collected in three villages in the south of Benin in 1976 and 1977. The corpus consists of 37 stories (57.000 words). The stories aim at children’s education.

This thesis investigates the grammar of Sheko, an Omotic language spoken in southwest Ethiopia.

The book reinterprets the role of the UN during the Congo crisis from 1960 to 1964, presenting a multidimensional view of the organisation.

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.

Political scientist Corinna Jentzsch (Leiden University) explains why Mozambique is not (yet) a success story.

This dissertation for the first time provides a detailed description of Benchnon, a language spoken by approximately 200.000 people in Southwest Ethiopia.

In The Golden Mean of Languages, Alisa van de Haar sheds new light on the debates regarding the form and status of the vernacular in the early modern Low Countries, where both Dutch and French were local tongues. The fascination with the history, grammar, spelling, and vocabulary of Dutch and French…

On November 17, 2017, Professor Simone van der Hof gave a duo lecture with her colleague Professor Eva Lievens from Ghent University during the 'Children and Digital Rights' conference at the Information Law and Policy Centre, which is part of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies (University of L…

Children have the right to play and relax. Games, social media and video platforms are attractive new ways to do that. However, hardly any online games are designed specifically for children, nor do they factor in children's rights.

During the first year of life, babies adapt to the language they hear around them. In the event of hearing difficulties, this can lead to a language deficiency, which is not so easy to resolve, says Professor of English Linguistics Janet Grijzenhout. Inaugural lecture 19 March.