The Department of Linguistics and Communication at the University of Birmingham is a world-leading centre of excellence for both teaching and research.
We run two very popular BA programmes in English Languag and Linguistics and Digital Media and Communications which reflect the department’s distinctive research strengths. We also run internationally-renowned MA and PhD programmes in Applied Linguistics, English Language Teaching and Translation Studies. Our postgraduate programmes are offered both on campus and via Distance Learning, and on our Distance Learning programmes we have students in over fifty countries.
The department has an excellent track record in teaching and an active research culture that emphasises excellent publications, productive collaboration within and beyond the University, and wide-ranging public engagement.
We conduct research into a wide range of areas of human language and communication all of which involve the technical study of language. They include the following:
- Corpus Linguistics
- Multimodal communication including signed languages and gesture
- Distributional and register features of language and data visualisation
- First and second language acquisition
- Embodied cognition and its relationship to language and communication
- Figurative language in real-world communication
- Iconicity in multimodal communication
- Large language models
- Digital and social media communication
- Sociolinguistics, language variation and change
- Stylistics and authorship analysis
- Academic discourse and critical literacy
- Institutional and corporate discourse, with a focus on the linguistic representation of trust
- Diversity in human language and communication
- Language evolution and its relation to animal communication