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When students mind their language

An understanding of linguistics can spell advantages in a variety of career paths, says Alex McRae. Perhaps that's why more and more students see it as the last word when deciding on a degree

Thursday 10 April 2003 00:00 BST
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To the average irate neighbour kept awake by a booming party held by students across the road, the idea that politeness is a hot topic at university might seem unlikely. But Jonathan Culpeper, a senior lecturer in linguistics at Lancaster University, is studying just that. He's looking at how people adapt language to oil the wheels of communication – or, as he jokingly puts it, "the mechanics of buttering-up". With over a hundred undergraduates a year coming to Lancaster to study linguistics, it seems students are waking up to the ways in which language affects our everyday life. Understanding the complex systems at work tells some students about the human mind, and helps othersmake language work for them.

The runaway success of English Language A level is fuelling sixth-formers' interest in taking linguistics as a degree. Cutting across a huge subject area, from maths to literature, taking in sociology, psychology, and biology along the way, linguistics has three core areas – sound, grammatical structure and meaning – the basic ingredients of human language. Once students are au fait with this tool kit, they can investigate a fascinating array of issues, from unravelling the rhetoric of politicians discussing the "war on terror" to studying the way deaf toddlers learn sign language. At the University of Wales in Bangor, students often work with north Wales police, developing ways of interviewing vulnerable children in abuse cases without guiding the child towards a particular response. Meanwhile, students taking the language and humour course at the University of the West of England in Bristol learn why a joke hilarious in Yoruba may go down like a lead balloon in Swedish.

This breadth means that linguistics is an excellent choice for students whose talents don't obviously seem to fit into a single arts or science bracket. It also works particularly well combined with another subject, as part of a joint honours degree. There's another reason why students are attracted to linguistics alongside another area: at first, many people may have a pretty murky idea of what the subject actually involves. At Lancaster, students can major in one subject and take one or two others on the side, so that if they fall in love with linguistics while taking it as a second option, they can swap later and take it as their main degree. "It allows people to dip their toe in the water", explains Culpeper.

Different universities' linguistics courses branch out in different ways. At the University of the West of England, new students are encouraged to reassess their own prejudices and attitudes towards language, by taking part in a research project where they listen to a tape of the same person speaking in two different dialects, and say which voice they prefer. The students analyse the results themselves, and "learn by doing", says Dr Jeanine Treffers-Daller, Head of the School of Languages and Linguistics at UWE. She adds that by the third year, some students end up working with her to publish research papers "rather than the tutor walking off with all the credit".

Meanwhile, at Ulster University, there is a special focus on social communication, or lack of it: students may study the language used in a news bulletin, try to unpick political speeches, or look at the way that the different groups in Northern Irish society communicate. As Catrin Rhys, Course Director of the BSc in language and linguistics explains, "things we take for granted, like conversation, are actually very complex. We're trying to show how society is structured and identified by language – how we organise our everyday world by the way we talk about it".

Linguistics is a great subject to have on your CV. "You get a phenomenal range of graduate transferable skills," says Rhys. At the University of Essex, Professor Martin Atkins says linguistics graduates end up in all kinds of fields, some going on to do a speech therapy or teacher training course, and "more and more students who want to stay and do further research". And there's another benefit too, as Dr Marjolein Groefsema of Hertfordshire University confides, "it sounds silly but so many job applications end up in the bin because of bad spelling. Linguistics students are better spellers."

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