English Language & Linguistics

Levels 3 and 4 (Honours)

Admission to the two Honours years (Level 3 = Junior Honours, Level 4 = Senior Honours) is conditional on good progress at Levels 1 and 2.

Glasgow’s Honours programme allows you to take a range of courses in one or more of our four areas: modern English language, history of English, medieval English literature, and Scots.  We offer in addition specialist courses rarely offered at undergraduate level, such as Old Norse and manuscript studies, or historical and modern dialectology, or sociophonetics, or literary and linguistic computing. 

You will also undertake a piece of original research leading to a dissertation on a project of your own devising.  Some students have carried out fieldwork on their own dialect or sociolect; others have studied medieval manuscripts or sixteenth- or seventeenth-century early printed books in Glasgow’s internationally-famous Special Collections.  Some have worked on the fascinating critical issues raised by medieval English literature.  Some have used the resources of Glasgow’s world-famed Historical Thesaurus project for advanced research into semantics and lexicology; others have used our state-of-the-art Phonetics Lab and Sound Studio for advanced work on articulatory or acoustic phonetics.  Throughout you will be supervised and advised by internationally-acclaimed scholars at the cutting edge of the subject.  In the most recent national Research Assessment Exercise (2008) English studies at Glasgow was rated the best in Scotland for research strength, and the third in the UK after Oxbridge.