Linguistics and English Language at The University of Manchester

Linguistics and English Language students study topics such as the ways in which dialects differ, how Old English developed into Modern English, the ways in which children acquire their first language, differences between the speech of men and women, how the sound systems and grammars of different types of language are organised, what happens when speakers of different languages come into contact, plus much else besides.

The department of Linguistics and English Language at The University of Manchester is unrivalled in its exceptional breadth of subject areas and theoretical approaches. Our particular strengths include: phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax (lexical-functional grammar, role and reference grammar, construction grammar, and minimalism), (formal) semantics and pragmatics, historical linguistics, the linguistics of English, typology, language contact and sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, endangered languages, field linguistics, language documentation, and quantitative corpus-based approaches.

Our research is internationally renowned and, in recent years, we have been very successful in winning research grants in many of these areas.  We have recently welcomed a number of new staff members to our young, diverse, and enthusiastic department, bringing additional momentum to our research strengths in phonology and phonetics and the English langauges past and present.

We conduct empirical and theoretical research, particularly a combination of the two. We also believe that it is important to study language in its social and cultural contexts – several of our staff are engaged in research on language variation and its correlation with social conditions such as class, gender and age. With its diverse local communities, Manchester is an ideal site for carrying out research on such variation, as well as on multilingualism.

Why study Linguistics and English Language with us?

As a Linguistics and English Language student, you will work in close collaboration with internationally renowned experts in a wide range of specialisms and languages (English, Germanic, Romance, Russian, Iranian, Romani, North and South American and Australian languages, as well as the more than 200 languages spoken in the Greater Manchester area). Students are trained to conduct fieldwork and to analyse linguistic corpora, and they are strongly encouraged to do so during their degree.

You will also have the opportunnity to participate in an Erasmus exchange scheme with the University of Paderborn.

Amongst our excellent resources here at The University of Manchester are a Phonetics Laboratory with facilities for signal analysis, speech synthesis, laryngography and electropalatography, a large collection of specialist software and linguistic corpora, and, in The University of Manchester Library, one of the largest holdings in linguistics in the UK.

If you would like to do some advance reading to find out more about linguistics:

• R.A. Hudson's Invitation to Linguistics, published by Blackwell, gives a good picture of the kinds of issues that linguistics can deal with.
• R.L Trask's Language: the Basics, published by Routledge, is another good place to start.
• David Crystal's Encyclopedia of Language, published by Cambridge University Press.