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.

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 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.

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

A linguistic prehistory of the Tarim Basin in Northwest China

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

Une étude archéo-anthropologique de la céramique des sociétés caribéennes multiculturelles de la période précoloniale à nos jours

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…

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

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.

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!

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

This PhD project investigates the different uses of Mandarin

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

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…

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…

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 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…

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

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.

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

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…

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.

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

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…

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…

This subproject of 'From Homo Economicus to Political Animal' analyzes Greek economic thinking in late 5th- and 4th-century philosophical circles.

The present investigation aims at exploring whether the instruction provided at secondary schools in the capital meets the requirements of Communicative Language Teaching and whether the aims of improving learners’ communicative proficiency are met.

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

The ultimate aim of the project is to find out whether there are such things as

Like any language, the natural sign languages (henceforth: SLs) of deaf communities differ from each other in their grammars and lexicons. A growing number of studies indicates that SLs make use of the gestures of hearing speakers to build linguistic structure. This implies that variation and similarities…

How do speakers adapt to multilingual contexts?

This project explores how Muslim authorities and writers use Russian to transmit Islamic contents, and whether this leads to a specific

This collaborative research group (CRG) facilitates the synergies of researchers engaged with African languages and documentation of texts conducted in East Africa, paying particular attention to ‘endangered archives’ and ‘endangered languages’.

The research focuses on the understanding of symbolic stratigraphy of the land (through time) from the worldview of the People of the Rain (one of the Indigenous Peoples of southern Mexico), by studying contemporary cultural heritage in communities of the Mixtec Highlands.

The Swahili coast has a long-standing history of transoceanic Islamic connections dating back to the 25th century. Yet, print, has changed the world – not only ours. This project unravels unique forms and archives of intellectual history emerging from within South-South connections. In East Africa Indian…

The fragmentary is everywhere: we encounter fragments in social media (Tiktok, Twitter), in personal memories from our childhood, and in traditions from our cultural heritage.

To what extent do aspects of fluency fluctuate throughout time? And how do raters take the dynamicity of fluency into account when rating performances?

In the specialisation in Modern Languages you will explore the structure, acquisition, history and use of one or more of these five languages in depth: Chinese, English, French, German and/or Italian.