Linguistics

It'll probably be quite hard to find many universities which would let you study Physics and Linguistics.

Linguistics is interesting but also very different from anything you will have studied at A level (even French A level doesn't really go much into the principles of linguistics behind the French language). I'd recommend you read some introductory material on it. This is one of the recommended intro texts at Oxford: http://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Victoria-Fromkin-Robert-Rodman-Nina-Hyams-An-Introduction-to-Language.pdf

Hello, I'm currently in the process of trying to decide what I'd like to do at university and I have recently come across Linguistics. I'm doing french A-level but am not sure if I'd actually want to simply study a language at uni so linguistics sounded interesting. I've looked up some stuff about it but I was wondering if there was anyone who is studying it that could let me know what it's like as that would be a great help! Also, I'm interested in physics so does anyone know if it is possible to combine a language and a science or are they kept separate as a rule? Thanks

I studied linguistics at undergrad level, so if you have any specific questions you'd like to ask feel free. The scientific take on it is interesting - if you're after a physics angle then acoustic phonetics would probably be the main crossover. Here you might end up studying the wave characteristics of speech sounds etc. Ultimately it would be tricky to combine, but not impossible.

A text I could recommend would be the Language Instinct by Steven Pinker. It raises the sorts of questions you would expect to explore on a linguistics degree. For stuff on the physics-linguistics crossover, another book would be Peter Ladefoged's book Elements of Acoustic Phonetics.

Thank you, this is really helpful! One quick question - how essay based is linguistics?

This is quite difficult to answer because I'm sure the mode of assessment varies from one university to another. Based on my own experience (UCL) there was a lot of coursework, and the assessments generally took the form either of essays or of reports/analysis.

When I say reports/analysis, I'm talking about a scenario in a phonology class where you are given a list of words from an unspecified language and you have to figure out some aspect of that language's phonological system. It wouldn't be a formal report like you'd see in a chemistry student's lab write-up, but it would probably resemble that better than an essay.

The assessments would vary depending on the leaning of different universities, and of course between different modules. If you were less keen on essays, for example, you could pick universities offering more scientific optional modules.

oh and just wondering, where are you studying?

It'll probably be quite hard to find many universities which would let you study Physics and Linguistics.

Linguistics is interesting but also very different from anything you will have studied at A level (even French A level doesn't really go much into the principles of linguistics behind the French language). I'd recommend you read some introductory material on it. This is one of the recommended intro texts at Oxford: http://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Victoria-Fromkin-Robert-Rodman-Nina-Hyams-An-Introduction-to-Language.pdf