Dr. Sterre Leufkens is assistant professor in Dutch linguistics at the department of Languages, Literature and Culture and the department of Dutch Language and Culture. She is affiliated to the Institute for Language Sciences and the research group Language Structure: Variation and Change.

She conducts language typological research on the learnability and complexity of the world's languages. How can we measure how difficult a language is? And how can we use that knowledge to help learners? Specifically, Leufkens looks at phenomena that are difficult to learn because of a lack of functionality, e.g. language forms that do not make a difference in meaning (think of forms like ‘it’ in 'it is raining') and language forms that express something that is already expressed elsewhere (e.g. plural forms in the presence of a +1 numeral). In her research, Leufkens combines information from descriptive sources with data from corpora.

From this theoretical research line, a valorising project has emerged: Leufkens is project leader on the 'Mother tongue in NT2' project. The project entails the continuing development of a web app that makes knowledge about structural properties of languages accessible to teachers of Dutch as a second language. This allows them to better respond to similarities and differences between Dutch and the languages in question in their teaching. The web app is free to use at https://www.moedint2.nl; an English version for teachers of English as a second language can be accessed here. 

Sterre Leufkens teaches courses on second language teaching, language policy and language variation. She gives guest lectures on science communication. She previously taught on theoretical linguistics (both functionalist and generative models), language contact and syntax.

Sterre Leufkens is a part-time science journalist and publishes articles and books on language for a wide audience.