There was an open day on the Friday just gone for Linguistics and MML. I'm really, really keen to do a linguistics degree so went along and it was really good.
I'll try and give you a bit of basic infor, if that's what you're after....
The course is being made into a three year long course. It will require a minimum of three A grade A-levels, but the faculty is currently a bit unsure of how they are going to handle the introduction of A*s. The estimate is that they will take on roughly 20 students for the three year course, but that could go way up or down since, being a new course, they don't know how many applicants to expect. It will be taught at the Sidgwick site.
There were two professors I spoke to at the Open Day. One was American, the other English. Both were really friendly. One of them - the English guy - invented Parseltongue for the Harry Potter films, and was talking about the ways he went about it (the sort of sounds and syntax formations he had to discuss). He is a specialist in phonetic forensics, so using elements of language to solve crimes and such. This can be incorporated into the course and is something you can choose to study.
The American, who pleasingly pronounced his name 'Bert' just like Ernie does in Sesame Street, was into sociolinguistics (though the title of this will be changed, I think) - so how language imapacts society. This was one of the more interesting ones, I felt.
There was also a woman who I thought was Spanish who looked at psycholinguistics (the relationship of language to the mind), and also a bit at the forensic side.
Everyone on the day was lovely, friendly and said the course was great.
The first year will be split into four papers so you will get an impression of the different aspects of linguistics (most of which were detailed by supergrunch earlier), and he following years you can either start to specialise and choose your favourite stuff or keep it fairly general, I think.
They have a full equipped phonetics lab, which is amazing - it has loads of sound equipment and there are experiments to be tried and stuff. It was really good. The library on the Sidgwick site currently has a small linguistics section which will probably be expended before the introduction of the new course.
As of yet, they have not specified A-Levels as linguisics is composed of both arts and science elements, but they are looking for people with a real interest in language and the course.
I thought it looked like such an amazing course and because it's Cambridge I think you cna pretty much gurantee it will be high standard.
I hope this was hopeful
