Bachelor of Arts - Linguistics (Including Placement Year) (Q103)

Linguists study questions to gain insight into what it means to “know a language”. An understanding of language enhances self-awareness, inspiring people to address fundamental questions about communication between human beings. Linguistics is an increasingly important subject, impacting on areas in psychology, philosophy, education and artificial intelligence. It has real-world applications in such diverse fields as human rights, computer-assisted language learning, and the study of institutional language in settings like doctor-patient interactions, interviewer-interviewee dialogues, and courtroom exchanges.

The course offers students a solid grounding in linguistics, while still allowing for a large amount of personal choice. Students explore a wide range of core topics in linguistics, mastering key concepts in phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics.

On a placement year students can gain relevant work experience within an external business, giving them a competitive edge in the graduate job market and providing them with key contacts within the industry. Students will be responsible for finding their placement, but with support and guidance provided by both the department and the Employability and Careers Centre.

University of Essex is a leading UK university for language and linguistics research, a place where talented students become part of an academic community in which the majority of research is rated ‘world-leading’ or ‘internationally excellent’, placing them firmly within the top 10 departments in the UK. Students have an opportunity to study different kinds of linguistics from structural linguistics to applied and experimental linguistics.

Studying language and linguistics allows students to develop their research and IT skills by collecting and analyzing linguistic data using state-of-the-art technology, and a combination of team-work and independent projects enhances students' communication, problem-solving, and management skills.

Graduates have gone on to have careers in a wide variety of fields, including teaching, journalism, advertising, marketing, travel, communications, publishing, speech and language therapy, and business administration.