Linguistics

University Website: www.mml.cam.ac.uk/ling/
Director of Studies: Dr Bert Vaux

The Rosetta stone (196 B.C.)

Linguistics, the scientific study of language, lies at the nexus of the natural and physical sciences, humanities, social sciences, maths, and computer science. Linguists seek to understand the structure, behavior, and evolution of human language and animal communication in all of their forms: spoken, signed, gestured, written, even whistled and drummed. Any language is fair game for linguistic study, from English to Euskara (Basque), Spanish to Sanskrit, Norwegian to Ntlaka’pamux.

The University Course

The Linguistics Tripos is divided into a one-year Part I and a two-year Part II. Part I, where you follow four lecture series, provides a foundation across a wide range of linguistics taught within the Department of Linguistics. Part II allows you to specialise in the areas which particularly interest you, and in Parts IIA and IIB (years 2 and 3) there is a wide choice of lectures taught within and beyond the Department, the latter including the linguistics of particular languages. Part IIB includes an element of individual research as you write a dissertation on a topic of your choice.

For a full list of papers see http://www.mml.cam.ac.uk/undergrad/LingTripos/papers.html

For other course information please see http://www.mml.cam.ac.uk/undergrad/LingTripos/lingsummary.html

After Your Degree

Linguistics graduates find employment in a wide range of professions. The fact that linguistics provides a broad interdisciplinary training, developing the ability to analyse quantitative data, construct abstract (grammatical) models, and test alternative hypotheses, means that linguistics graduates emerge with the kind of transferable intellectual skills that are highly sought after by employers. Careers for which linguistics provides particularly good preparation include speech therapy, teaching (especially of languages), speech and language technology (developing and improving computer-based applications such as speech recognition and translation software), and even forensic linguistics (in cases where authorship, voice identity, or place of origin are at issue). Familiarity with the range and essence of human languages is a huge advantage in careers where rapid learning of unfamiliar languages may be involved, such as the Diplomatic Service.

Linguistics at Christ’s

Christ’s has long been a hotbed of linguistic activity, perhaps more so than any other Cambridge college. Christ’s most famous alumnus, Charles Darwin, engaged in a famous debate with Max Müller (Professor of Comparative Philology at Oxford) over the evolution of language; a useful summary of Darwin’s views on the subject can be found here and the original exchange of letters here. Prominent historian and former fellow Quentin Skinner is known among other things for his work on speech act theory and rhetoric. Three members of the team commissioned by King James I to translate the Bible into Modern English were from Christ’s: Richard Clarke, Laurence Chaderton, and Francis Dillingham. Other famous alumni with linguistic interests have included:

• notorious Egyptologist Sir Ernest Alfred Wallis Budge
• Sir John Lyons, author of a famous book on Noam Chomsky and later master of Trinity Hall
• Walter William Skeat, author of the landmark Etymological English Dictionary and the definitive edition of Chaucer’s works
• Sir Ralph Turner, leading Indologist, author of the great Comparative Dictionary of the Indo-Aryan Languages, and director of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London
• Thomas Burrow, Boden Professor of Sanskrit at the University of Oxford and author of the classic The Sanskrit Language
• Alfred Cort Haddon, one of the founders of modern British anthropology, famous for his study of life in the Torres Strait Islands.

Preparation

The main requirement for studying linguistics is a lively curiosity about the nature of language. It may be that you’ve been struck by a language that puts its verbs in a different position in the sentence, or wondered why languages change (making Chaucer hard to understand, for instance), or been puzzled that automatic speech recognition software gets a perfectly clear word wrong, or realised that an utterance such as ‘it’s cold in here’ may mean more than the words (understood: ‘do close the window!’), or been excited to learn that languages as diverse as Welsh and Hindi have a common ancestor. Basically, if you’ve found yourself asking ‘why?’ or ‘how?’ in relation to language, linguistics is for you. Because linguistics is interdisciplinary we don’t require specific A-level subjects, and welcome applicants with an outstanding academic profile whether science-oriented or arts-centred. Some formal study of language, either through learning languages or through English Language A-level, does however serve as a good preparation.

Recommended Readings

• David Crystal, The Cambridge encyclopedia of language (1997)
• David Crystal, How language works (2006)
• Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: The New Science of Language and Mind (2003)

Bert Vaux (e-mail: bv230@cam.ac.uk) is a Fellow of King's College. 
His research interests concern phonology, morphology, dialectology, historical linguistics, and field work.