Undergraduate Studies
Inquiring minds
Linguistics is the discipline that explores the structure of language, its role in human activity, and its relationship to the biological and psychological human organism.
In addition to acquiring subject-specific skills and knowledge in the various major sub-disciplines of linguistics, students will acquire general intellectual and personal skills. This rigorous and broad training leads not only to graduate study in the language sciences, but to a wide range of related fields, among which language teaching, speech-language pathology, audiology, cognitive science, speech and language technologies and information technology stand out in particular.
Programs
Obtain a double honours degree in fields that have important areas of overlap (e.g. psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics). It has been designed particularly for students wishing to pursue a masters degree in Human Communication Disorders (primarily Speech-Language Pathology or Audiology), but it also provides an excellent training for students interested in Psycholinguistics, broadly defined, including those who wish to pursue graduate study in the field. Students who have no particular focus on graduate studies would benefit from the rigour of in-depth training in these two fields. It consists of 48 credits of each of two disciplines within a 120-credit degree.
This 120-credit program offers students the most specialized training, comprising a minimum of 60 credits in Linguistics.
The Honours BA program is designed to equip students with comprehensive knowledge in all key areas of Linguistics, both theoretical and empirical. An Honours BA in Linguistics can serve as an entry point for subsequent graduate studies in theoretical and empirical linguistics, psycholinguistics, or related fields such as speech-language pathology or audiology.
The Major in Linguistics comprises 42 credits in Linguistics. Majors can be combined with other disciplines, for instance a major and a minor, or two majors.
The program offers comprehensive training in the major areas of Linguistics. An Honours BA with a Major in Linguistics can serve as an entry point for subsequent graduate studies in theoretical and empirical linguistics, psycholinguistics, or related fields such as speech-language pathology or audiology.
Students majoring in another discipline can obtain a Minor in Linguistics by completing these 30 credits in Linguistics.
The program offers comprehensive training in the major areas of Linguistics, for students who do not intend to pursue graduate studies in this field.
Linguistics is one of the humanities because it focuses on the relationship between human beings and language, but it is also a science because of its systematic explanation of the facts of language and its use of instrumentation as well as experimental methodology.
Since Linguistics addresses the systematic study of language in both its theoretical and empirical aspects, the Department provides students with a solid training in foundational areas of the discipline, including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics, in addition to enabling students to explore other cognitive, social and historical aspects of language, including language variation, language acquisition, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics and historical linguistics.
Note that in accordance with the University of Ottawa’s bilingualism policy, students are free to submit their coursework and papers in either French or English and they may interact with faculty members in the official language of their choice.
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