Bachelor of Arts - Linguistics (Including Year Abroad) (Q101)

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.

Education extends beyond the university campus. Essex supports students in expanding their education through offering the opportunity to spend a year or a term studying abroad at one of their partner universities. The four-year version of the degree allows students to spend the third year abroad or employed on a placement abroad, while otherwise remaining identical to the three-year course. Studying abroad allows students to experience other cultures and languages, to broaden their degree socially and academically, and to demonstrate to employers that they are mature, adaptable, and organized.

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.