BA Linguistics
About this course
Linguistics is the systematic scientific study of human language, examining its structure, variation, acquisition, use and change across the full diversity of the world's languages and the communities that speak them. It is a discipline that draws on an unusually wide range of other fields, from philosophy and psychology through to physics, engineering and the social sciences, making it one of the most genuinely interdisciplinary subjects in the university. Linguists ask questions about the sounds, words, sentences and meanings of languages, about how children acquire them, how they vary across speakers and communities, how they change over time and how they can be processed and produced by the brain and by machines. At Cambridge, one of the world's great centres of linguistic scholarship, this three-year, full-time programme takes you through the major branches of the discipline, including phonetics and phonology, morphology and syntax, semantics and pragmatics, language acquisition, sociolinguistics, historical linguistics and computational linguistics. You will use methods drawn from multiple disciplines to analyse language data with rigour, developing both theoretical understanding and practical analytical skill. Cambridge's exceptional concentration of linguistic expertise across different subfields means you encounter the discipline at its most intellectually serious, with teaching informed by active research at the frontier of the field. Linguistics graduates are in demand across a wide range of sectors. Careers include natural language processing and computational linguistics, speech technology, language teaching and education, translation, lexicography, publishing, journalism, the civil service, speech and language therapy, and academic research. The analytical and research skills the discipline develops transfer broadly, and many graduates move into careers in law, policy, consulting, technology and data science, where the ability to analyse complex information systematically is highly valued. Postgraduate study in linguistics, computational linguistics, speech therapy or a related field is a natural continuation for many.
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