Niels Schoubben
Postdoc
- Name
- Dr. N. Schoubben MA
- Telephone
- +31 71 527 2727
- n.schoubben@hum.leidenuniv.nl
- ORCID iD
- 0000-0002-1190-1838
Niels Schoubben is a postdoctoral researcher in the ERC project “The Silk Road Language Web” (PI: Prof. dr. Michaël Peyrot). As a linguist-cum-philologist, he studies the written remains of extinct Central Asian languages in order to uncover words and grammatical patterns borrowed from one ancient language into the other. In his PhD dissertation (defended in 2024), he focused on language contact between Niya Prakrit (a form of Gāndhārī) and Bactrian; currently, he is investigating Gāndhārī loanwords into Khotanese and Tocharian.
More information about Niels Schoubben
Fields of interest
- Historical linguistics
- Language Contact
- Philology
- Middle Indo-Aryan and Sanskrit
- Middle Iranian
- Tocharian
- Ancient and Medieval Greek
Research
Currently, I am a postdoctoral researcher at Leiden University, where I am part of the ERC project “The Silk Road Language Web” (PI: Michaël Peyrot). Before this, I wrote my doctoral dissertation on “Traces of language contact: Bactrian and other foreign elements”, also at Leiden University. Having a background in classics, Indology, and comparative philology, I study South and Central Asian languages and texts dating to the first millennium before and after the start of the common era. The languages I like to approach from the perspective of contact linguistics and historical (socio)linguistics; the texts I study with traditional philological methods. During the past years, Gāndhārī and Bactrian have been the languages that played the most prominent part in my research. For my postdoctoral research, I am additionally working on Khotanese and Tocharian, in particular on the Gāndhārī loanwords found in these languages. My academic interests extend, however, beyond the purely linguistic to also include Indian religions and literature; textual criticism as applied to Greek grammatical treatises; and the history of 19th- and 20th-century philological scholarship.
CV
| 2024 - present | Postdoctoral researcher in the ERC project “The Silk Road Language Web” |
| 2019 - 2024 | PhD student at Leiden University supervised by Prof. Peyrot and Prof. Lubotsky (dissertation on language contact between Niya Prakrit and Bactrian; defence 6 November 2024; cum laude) |
| 2018 - 2019 | MA Comparative Indo-European Linguistics, Leiden University (MA thesis on the phoneme /l/ in Ṛgvedic Sanskrit; summa cum laude) |
| 2018 - 2019 | MA Classics & Ancient Civilizations: Classics, Leiden University (MA thesis on Homeric Greek lexicography; cum laude) |
| 2017 - 2018 | MA Languages & Linguistics: Latin-Greek, Ghent University (MA thesis on the Homeric hexameter; extra courses in Classical Indology; summa cum laude with special congratulations) |
| 2014 - 2017 | BA Languages & Linguistics: Latin-Greek, Ghent University (BA thesis on language contact in the Greek Kandahar inscriptions; extra courses in Sanskrit; summa cum laude) |
Grants and awards
- 2021: Best MA thesis in Indo-European Linguistics 2020. Awarded by the Indogermanische Gesellschaft.
- 2018: Best MA thesis in Classics 2017-2018 at Ghent University. Awarded by the Ghent Institute for Classical Studies (GIKS).
Postdoc
- Faculty of Humanities
- Leiden Univ Centre for Linguistics
- LUCL VIET