Linguistics BA (Hons)

About This Course

Linguistics, like all the sciences, involves the systematic study of the patterns and regularities found in data. In the case of Linguistics, the data involves speech and language, something all humans possess and something that is central to our identity and existence.

For the past 150 years or so, a large body of knowledge has been built up about what exactly language is, how language works, how languages are acquired and how they change. Our Linguistics BA will introduce you to this and to the tools and methods that will allow you to undertake your own investigations into English as well as other languages spoken around the world. 

On this Linguistics BA degree, you will learn about, understand and interpret many aspects of human language. You will study the ‘science’ behind language, including possible sounds used in speech and their combination (phonetics, phonology), how words are built up morphology), what distinguishes sentences from just strings of words (syntax), meaning (semantics and pragmatics), the effect that society, culture and norms have upon language use (sociolinguistics) and how languages change over time. 

Linguistics as a subject has been taught at Bangor University since the 1960s, making our department one of the first linguistics departments in the UK. We are a vibrant, accessible, friendly department with staff committed to high-quality teaching, excellent student experience, strong pastoral support, and cutting-edge research. 

Our academic staff provide expertise and dissertation supervision in wide range of disciplines within Linguistics and the English Language that include: psycholinguistics, child language acquisition, 2nd language acquisition, discourse analysis, TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language), SLA and language teaching, corpus linguistics, language and communication, phonetics & phonology, morphosyntax, semantics and pragmatics, historical linguistics, language variation and change, language and communication, bilingualism, language disorders, Welsh linguistics and language technologies / NLP. 

Why choose Bangor University for this course?

• We are a vibrant, accessible, friendly department with staff committed to high-quality teaching, excellent student experience, strong pastoral support, and the integration of current cutting-edge research and topics into your lectures throughout the duration of your studies. We are also dedicated to ensuring that our Linguistics students develop excellent skills in critical thinking, data analysis, presentation and independent research to enhance their employability upon graduation.
• Our teaching staff are also active researchers in a range of applied and theoretical areas relating to the Linguistics and English Language - many have international reputations in the field.
• You will gain a sound and scientific insight into the structure and use of language, its history and the relationship between language and society.
• Our state-of-the-art learning facilities include a professional grade sound / recording studio (our Speech laboratory), an eye tracking laboratory, and an event-related potential (ERP) laboratory and a corpus-linguistics resource facility. We also have audio and video equipment that can be checked out for field work. Our facilities also include an extensive collection of books on Linguistics and English Language and a language library which is maintained by our undergraduate student association - the Bangor Linguistics Society (BLS).

Course Content

This Linguistics degree will be taught by a combination of lectures, tutorials and/or seminars, depending on the module and level. You will choose 120 credits of modules relating to Linguistics each year, where you start by learning the foundational knowledge required to study in this field in the different subdisciplines (Year 1), proceeding to more in-depth intermediate-level study (Year 2), before choosing what areas to specialize in (year 3). Modules are assessed on the basis of different kinds of coursework, including essays, reports, oral presentations, tests, exams, data analysis, etc. You will do a dissertation in your final year which represents an original research project which you will undertake under the supervision of a research-active member of staff.