BA LinguisticsAdd to shortlist
Programme profile
There are thousands of languages worldwide. We all speak and understand at least one of them, which we effortlessly learnt as a child. Language comes so naturally that we hardly give it any thought, but linguistics studies this phenomenon in a scientific way: how we acquire it, how we use it, and how it develops through the centuries.
In this programme, you will learn how language works, what processes take place in our brain when we talk and why languages change. Linguistics is versatile: it connects experiments (psychology), logic (philosophy), computer models (artificial intelligence) and field work (anthropology) to understand the most important feature of humankind: language!
Linguistics is a broad field of study. You can choose it if you are interested in the relation between language and culture, if you are interested in how language is ‘wired’ in the brain, if you are interested in its mathematical structure or its role in Artificial Intelligence. You can choose it if you are interested in the evolution of languages and societies through the centuries. And you can choose it if you are interested in all these things together too!
Programme content
Year 1
From Language to Linguistics; Psychology of Language; Language Meaning and Language Use; Phonetics; Sociolinguistics; Statistics; Language Development; Linguistic Invariance
Year 2
Digital Tools; Language and Computation; Experimental Psycholinguistics; Words in the Mind; Semantics; Language Acquisition
Year 3
Research Methods and Writing: Electives; Thesis
Entry Requirements
Three A-levels and three GCSEs
Six passes at Leaving Cert, inc 2 x H4
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01 October
01 May