Course summary

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. ‘Placement Year’ and 'International Experience Year’ options are available for this course. You will have the opportunity to fully consider these options when you have started your course at Bangor and can make an application for a transfer onto such a pathway at the appropriate time. You can find more information about these options on our website and if you have any questions, please get in touch. If you don’t have the required qualifications for this degree-level course or are looking to re-enter education after time away from study, then a Foundation Year Programme might be the right choice for you. Please see English Language and English Literature (with Foundation Year) QQFC.