Introduction to Linguistics

Find out how language works through linguistics

Language is fundamental to our everyday social interactions, our politics and culture, and our thoughts. We all have ideas about how language works, but what separates our own intuitions from linguistic knowledge?

On this course, you’ll get an introduction to the main approaches used in linguistic research, including linguistic experiments and discourse analysis. You’ll explore the key methods used in linguistic descriptions, and some of the everyday ‘myths’ about language. You will also discover how linguistic researchers turn our ideas about language into linguistic knowledge.

This course is designed for anyone interested in language and linguistics, but may be of particular interest to students looking to study English language or linguistics at university, or those working in language education.