The language guide

This language guide presents an overview of the languages you can study at Leiden University. Of course, some languages can be studied in greater detail than others. A language like Russian, for instance, is taught in a very thorough 3-year programme with language acquisition courses in each year. When you finish the programme you will have an excellent command of Russian. Alongside these "main" languages, the various departments harbour a host of other languages you can get acquainted with. When you decide to study one of these, you will typically follow a course of one or two semesters, after which you will, depending on the goal of the course, speak or read the language quite reasonably. Fairly often, lecturers offer extensions of such courses. On the language's information page you can easily see in which of the two categories the language falls by looking at the duration and intensity of the courses.

When you click on "language list", you will find the languages, alphabetically ordered by their English name. For completeness sake, we also present the name of the language in the language itself (whenever that is possible). Through this list you can access the data pages for the various languages. A description of what you can see on these pages can be found here. There is a second way in which you can reach these data pages: through the world map. On this map, the languages you can study in Leiden are shown with red dots. When you move the mouse pointer over such a dot, the name of the corresponding language will be shown in a yellow info block. Moreover, the name will also appear at the bottom left of the map window, along with the location of the main area in which the language is spoken. For languages that are spoken in a large area the location mentioned is often the capital of a country, or the geographical centre of the area in which the language is spoken. No language communities other than that in the country from which the language originates are indicated. You can find a dot for Spanish only in Madrid, not in Lima, Guatemala City, etc. Click on one of the red dots to go to the data page of the corresponding language.

Finally, you can go to this page from anywhere in the guide by selecting "directions" in the menu. Of course, you can also go back to the homepage by clicking "home". Clicking on the top left logo will lead you to the university homepage, while clicking on "Humanities" will take you to the faculty homepage.

A tour of the data on the information pages

The data on the language page is structured identically for all the languages in the guide. It is impossible to present all possible data for all languages. For instance, there are no speakers of Akkadian left, so a button on which you can click to listen to a speech sample will be quite useless. Below, you will find an overview of the data you may find on the ideal language page (one for which all data are available):

  • Language name: The name of the language in English. Often the description here is more accurate than the graphic one you find at the top of the page.
  • Translation: A translation of the sentence "Leiden is where you study languages", or something rather similar. Only for languages in which the sentence was not translatable (for whatever reason), an alternative is sometimes given. The translation consists of 4 parts, at most: 1. The sentence in original script, 2. The sentence in transcription (Latin script), 3. A word for word translation (so-called "gloss"), and 4. A grammatical translation into English.
  • Megaphone: You can see a speech signal (oscillogram) coming from the megaphone. Click on this picture to listen to the spoken version of the sentence above it. In most cases you will hear the lecturer who teaches the language, but in some cases the recordings were made with a native speaker of the language who also works at Leiden University.
  • Language name: The name of the language in English and the language itself. See also the language list.
  • Language family: The genetic affiliation of the language. This affiliation indicates which other languages are closely related to the language in question. Sometimes the genetic description is quite long, which indicates that the language belongs to a subgroup of a subgroup of... etc. of a language family. The descriptions come from the Ethnologue (in some cases shortened a bit). For more information, look at www.ethnologue.com.
  • Department: The name of the department in which the language is taught.
  • URL Department: A link to the departmental website
  • Lecturer(s): The names of the people who teach the language, clickable, so you can mail them your questions directly.
  • Course description: A description of the language acquisition courses offered by the department to learn the language in question.
  • Total duration: Indicates how many semesters you will (can) invest in learning this language.
  • Frequency:: Some courses are not taught every year. You will need to take that into account when you plan your curriculum. Here you can find the relevant information.
  • Table: The table indicates the weight of the entire programme. Here you find the credit (ECTS) you will receive upon completion of the course, and the number of hours you will need to invest in language acquisition (NB: the curriculum for any given study will not only consist of language acquisition courses, there are always other courses you need to take). The credits and contact hours are presented per year, and whenever possible, further divided over the subjects speaking, reading and writing. We present the number of hours per week, so as to give a good impression of the intensity of the course. Sometimes, however, you may find the total number of hours for the entire course in this field. If either the course hours or the credits are broken down like this: x/y, then the x represents the number for the first semester, while the y represents the number for the second semester (unless of course, the course only lasts one semester). Finally, the course level indicates the highest attainable level for this course or series of courses. The level of the first courses in a given curriculum might well be lower than the number you find here. Two course level indication systems are used: The "Common European Framework of Reference" (or CEFR) and the "abstract 100-600 structure". CEFR is the norm, but unfortunately it is not suitable, or even developed, for all languages. Hence, we allowed some of the departments teaching exotic languages to use the older 100-600 structure for the description of their BA-courses. Please consult the following documentation to find out what the numbers mean (click to download the PDF version):
  • Class types: presents the format in which the course is taught. It might consist of only lectures, only tutorials, or a combination of both. Other types, like computer assisted learning, are also possible.
  • Examination types: Finally, the format of the final exam, usually written or oral.

Rendering of "exotic" scripts.

One of the biggest difficulties in creating a website on languages is making sure texts from those languages that do not use our regular alphabet are represented correctly. Fortunately, some visionary people have initiated the development of an alternative for Ascii quite a while ago. This alternative, called Unicode, will encompass a lot more symbols than Ascii does. (ASCII is the encoding that makes sure an e-mail typed on a Mac transfers correctly to a PC or UNIX machine, without the letters being garbled, so a t is always a t because it is Ascii encoded, and all computers use Ascii for the encoding. Unfortunately Ascii encodes only 254 symbols, the letters of your typewriter, plus some special symbols.) Unicode (see www.unicode.org) reserves much more space for characters. It encodes no less than 65.536 symbols, and quite a few of the exotic scripts from languages taught at this university have already been incorporated. Since there is no doubt that Unicode will replace Ascii in the near future, we have decided to use it on this website.

There are 2 consequences of this decision. First of all you need a unicode font to actually see some of the symbols on the language data pages. The website uses Arial Unicode MS, a widely distributed font that many people already have. It was included in Windows 2000 and Office 2000, and Windows XP installs it when you allow foreign language support. In Windows 95 and 98, the font will work, but you'll need to download it and copy it to your font folder (it is easy to find; use Google and you're bound to stumble across it). Secondly, Macintosh did not (fully) support Unicode until OSX appeared, and now there are not enough Mac fonts yet to accommodate all the characters we need. Therefore, we created an alternative site that uses pictures instead of fonts to which Mac users are automatically redirected. It is this alternative we have used for the English version as well. If you want to see the Unicode version in action. Click here (Dutch only!).

Websites with more information

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