BA Linguistics

Our BA Linguistics course will enable you to delve into the science of language - an everyday phenomenon which impacts our lives on an individual and a global scale.

Through our course, you will explore the sounds and structure of languages across the globe, studying topics such as:

how languages arise, change and die;
how children acquire their first language;
how adults learn a second or foreign language;
differences between the speech of men and women;
how we communicate as individuals and within groups;
what happens when speakers of different languages come into contact.
With its diverse local communities, Manchester is an ideal site for carrying out research on linguistic variation and multilingualism. We conduct empirical and theoretical research and particularly a combination of the two.

You'll have access to one of the largest holdings of linguistics texts in the UK, and the opportunity to conduct research using English manuscripts held in our prestigious Special Collections. We have two laboratories, where you'll have the chance to use ultrasound imaging, laryngography and eye tracking technology.

You'll also be able to use quantitative methods in the study of large language corpora. This is a skill which you'll then be able to apply to other fields throughout your life.

Linguistics at Manchester is unrivalled in its breadth of subject areas and theoretical approaches. Our particular strengths include, among others, phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics, historical linguistics, forensic linguistics, and quantitative corpus-based approaches.

You'll be encouraged to take an active role in funded teaching-enhancement projects. For example, some of our students have developed an online atlas of dialect variation in the UK.