Bachelor of Arts (Honours) - English Language and Linguistics

Students will be introduced to Linguistics, the scientific study of everything to do with language, from its structure and how it develops in children, to the ways it reflects society, how it’s used, and how it changes over time. They’ll be taught by research-active academics working in cutting-edge areas such as language and gender, formulaic language, corpus studies, bilingualism, bilingual processing and codeswitching.

What links work at Hertfordshire is their focus on the applied use of English language, from English Language teaching to the use of forensic linguistics in solving language-related real-life problems such as plagiarism and crime investigation, to speech and language therapy and the study of language disorders.

In the first year, alongside core linguistics modules, students will study language and mind, where they’ll analyse child speech transcripts and consider language acquisition. Students will also explore the diversity of use of the English language including regional variants, pidgin and creole English, language and ethnicity, and slang and street English.

Core modules in the second year focus on English grammar and the sounds of English. Students can explore theories of how and why language developed and take a language competencies module leading to a work placement.

In the final year students can develop their own interests in short projects, or follow modules in different topics, including child language and communication, clinical linguistics, gender and language, and formulaic language, informed by our academics’ own research specialisms.

One final year option is corpus studies in English language, which will develop students' research skills through their use of Sketch Engine, a text analysis tool that allows students to search vast samples of language, or corpora. Want to know when the word ‘Brexit’ first appeared in print or when ‘backstop’ acquired a new meaning? Find out by delving into databases of billions of words, to pursue their own original research projects.