Language and Linguistics with Mandarin

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language: how it is structured, how it is acquired, how it varies across communities, and how it changes over time. It is a discipline that brings rigorous analytical methods to something so fundamental and universal that we often take it entirely for granted. Mandarin Chinese is an ideal complement to linguistics study because it represents a typologically distinct kind of language from most European tongues, with a tonal phonological system, a logographic writing system, and a grammatical structure that challenges assumptions about how language works.

At the University of Aberdeen, you will explore the evolution of human language and speech while developing proficiency in Mandarin, a language with over five thousand years of history and spoken by around a fifth of the world's population. You will study how languages are acquired, how they change over time, the diversity of linguistic structures across the world's languages, and the cognitive and social dimensions of human communication. Alongside this, you will build a broad understanding of Chinese culture and develop your Mandarin to a working level of proficiency.

The programme includes a year abroad, offering the opportunity to study in a Mandarin-speaking environment. It runs over four years full-time.

Graduates of linguistics with Mandarin programmes pursue careers in translation and interpreting, international business, diplomacy, the civil service, education, language technology, and research. Mandarin is among the most commercially valuable languages in the world, and combining it with linguistics gives graduates a distinctive analytical perspective on language that is valued in roles involving communication, data, and cross-cultural work. Postgraduate routes include applied linguistics, translation, sinology, and computational linguistics.