French and Linguistics

French and linguistics is a pairing that develops language proficiency and cultural understanding alongside the systematic scientific study of how language itself works. French brings access to one of the world's great literary and cultural traditions and to a language spoken across Europe, Africa, the Caribbean and beyond. Linguistics asks the underlying questions: how are languages structured?

How do they change over time? How do children acquire them? How do sounds, words and sentences combine to create meaning?

Together the two disciplines develop both practical communicative competence and the analytical tools to understand what language is and how it functions.

This four-year full-time degree at the University of York includes a sandwich year with a work placement alongside the year in which language study is pursued intensively abroad. You will be taught in French, with a focus on society, politics and culture, guided by staff many of whom are native speakers, developing your fluency and depth of knowledge rapidly. The linguistics component provides a rigorous scientific education in phonetics, phonology, syntax, semantics, sociolinguistics and language acquisition, giving you a framework for understanding language that extends well beyond French alone.

The combination of immersive language study and linguistic analysis develops an unusual depth of understanding of how French works and what it means.

Graduates from French and linguistics programmes work in translation, interpreting, language teaching, speech and language therapy, computational linguistics, natural language processing, publishing, journalism, international business and a wide range of roles where advanced French proficiency and analytical language skills are valued. The linguistics training is also directly relevant to careers in speech technology, language documentation, applied linguistics and educational research. Further study in French studies, linguistics, applied linguistics or translation is a natural route for those seeking specialist or academic careers.