This project investigates the influence that Arabic (esp. dialectal Arabic) has had on the Berber languages of Northern Africa.

This study examines the mutual intelligibility between all 225 pairs of 15 Chinese dialects, in two main branches, i.e., six Mandarin dialects and nine non-Mandarin (Southern) dialects.

In this dissertation, the types of context Dutch speakers need to interpret the poly-interpretable word ergens ‘somewhere/anywhere’ are studied.

This dissertation provides a grammatical description of Ghomara Berber, a Berber language spoken in North-West Morocco by about 10.000 people. The grammar consists of a description of the phonology, the morphology and the syntax. In the appendices a number of texts and a wordlist are included. The data…

This dissertation investigates Extended Lexical Units (ELUs), elements that are bigger than just one word and which are stored in the Lexicon.

My research addresses the function of the much-debated particle -nā in Biblical Hebrew, often translated with “please”, from the point of view of the most important ancient Bible translations (Greek, Syriac, Latin). It combines textual criticism, translation technique, discourse pragmatics, and the…

This dissertation defends the existence of a type of movement that has so far been considered not to be possible, namely, movement of a bare head to a specifier position over arbitrarily long distances.

Unlike the predominant and excessive focus on the problems of food production and food insecurity in Africa, this project views African culinary tradition as a vibrant and rich cultural heritage, intertwined with language use.

The goal of the MODOMA-project is to create a computer model of language acquisition.

This dissertation the role of the English dissenting minister Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) as a grammarian is studied.

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

This thesis investigates the connection between tonal realization and tone change (tone sandhi) in Wenzhou Chinese, and whether and how such a connection is conditioned by prosodic structure and focus marking.

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

The present monograph, spanning a wide range of world and local literatures represents a high academic standard of both literary criticism and philological analysis. By demonstrating her expertise as an Africanist conversant with the Arabic canon, Raia reveals how the narrative of Joseph has been re-narrated…

De menselijke geschiedenis strekt zich ver uit vóór de tijd waarin de mensen opschreven wat er zoal gebeurde.

Research on Inclusiveness and Diversity at the Faculty of Science at Leiden University

Promotor: Prof.dr. E.F. Smets, Co-promotor: Dr. V.S.F.T. Merckx

In this dissertation a large corpus of letter signs and texts gathered during fieldwork in Niger, and to a lesser extent Mali and Burkina Faso is used to show the graphemic diversity of the traditional script of the Tuaregs, tifinagh, and to analyze the orthographic system.

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…

The 10th edition of the World Congress of African Linguists (WOCAL), hosted by Leiden University, will be held online from 7 – 12 June. Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL) researchers give us an insight into how important and special this event actually is.

On the 16th of December, Yachan Liang successfully defended a doctoral thesis. Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Yachan on this achievement!

Niya Prakrit, a dialect of Central Asian Gāndhārī, served as the administrative language of the former Shanshan kingdom (3rd–4th century CE; Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, Northwest China). In this book, the author presents the first comprehensive study of language contact in Niya Prakrit, highlighting…

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

The Leiden Summer School in Language and Linguistics is visited every year by many scholars worldwide. Four of the 120 participants of the 7th Summer School in 2012, share their view of Leiden.

This study investigates the perception and production of emotional prosody by native and non-native listeners and speakers, i.e. Chinese and Dutch listeners and speakers, including Dutch L2 learners of Chinese.

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

What can languages spoken in the Lesser Sunda Islands today tell us about the histories of its various population groups?

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

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

Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL) is an independent institute within the Leiden University Humanities Faculty. A Management Team, consisting of an Academic Director, a Director of Education and an Institute Manager, is responsible for the overall running of the institute. This team is…

Online presentation