Course summary

This innovative joint honours programme combines two complementary approaches to the study of human culture and expression. Ethnology is the discipline which studies the culture and traditions of developed societies, while English Language looks at how English has changed over time. Ethnology is commonly offered in universities across Europe, but this is the only full undergraduate programme of its kind in the UK. In your ethnological work, you will study Scotland in a comparative context, and gain skills that you can apply to any culture. A highlight of the programme is the opportunity to work with thousands of hours of recordings in Scots, Gaelic, English, and in dialects now extinct. Scottish Ethnology Ethnology is sometimes described as being at the intersection where history and anthropology meet. Focusing on Scotland, but also looking at comparative material from elsewhere, our programme looks at the varying ways in which a modern European nation expresses itself culturally. We ask questions like:

• How do customs, beliefs, social organisation, language, music and song help to create and shape identity in the modern world?

• How do we use and make sense of the past from within our present?

• How can this understanding help us to shape our future?

• 33,000 recordings of songs, music, stories, rhyme and verse

• thousands of photographs and rarely-seen historic documents which capture exceptional and everyday aspects of Scottish culture and heritage

• the principles of theoretical linguistics

• the way we learn language

• the regional and social variations of language, particularly the English language

• methods of communication