Scottish Ethnology and English Language

This innovative joint honours programme combines two complementary approaches to the study of human culture and expression.

Ethnology is the discipline which studies the culture and traditions of developed societies, while English Language looks at how English has changed over time.

Ethnology is commonly offered in universities across Europe, but this is the only full undergraduate programme of its kind in the UK. In your ethnological work, you will study Scotland in a comparative context, and gain skills that you can apply to any culture.

A highlight of the programme is the opportunity to work with thousands of hours of recordings in Scots, Gaelic, English, and in dialects now extinct.

Scottish Ethnology

Ethnology is sometimes described as being at the intersection where history and anthropology meet.

Focusing on Scotland, but also looking at comparative material from elsewhere, our programme looks at the varying ways in which a modern European nation expresses itself culturally.

We ask questions like:

• how do customs, beliefs, social organisation, language, music and song help to create and shape identity in the modern world?

• how do we use and make sense of the past from within our present?

• how can this understanding help us to shape our future?

Follow in the footsteps of fieldworkers

Studying Scottish Ethnology is your chance to work with the rich range of materials in the School of Scottish Studies Archives and Scottish Studies Library.

You will explore the work of former staff and students who, since 1951, have been capturing elements of life in Scotland's farming and fishing communities, towns and cities.

Today, the Archives include:

• 33,000 recordings of songs, music, stories, rhyme and verse

• thousands of photographs and rarely-seen historic documents which capture exceptional and everyday aspects of Scottish culture and heritage

These materials are kept alive through our teaching, undergraduate and postgraduate research, and through the work of our Traditional Artist and Gaelic Writer in Residence.

English Language

The English language has a well-recorded history of more than 1,000 years.
Its changes can be traced through written materials ranging from medieval manuscripts to text messages, and more recently, through recordings of spoken English.
Your studies will develop your knowledge and understanding of:

• the principles of theoretical linguistics

• the way we learn language

• the regional and social variations of language, particularly the English language

• methods of communication

In your honours years, you can opt to study the Scots language, which has its own rich linguistic and literary tradition.

The benefits of the four-year degree

Our four-year programme is very flexible. In Years 1 and 2, in addition to your core subjects, you will choose option courses from a broad list of disciplines.

You can, for example, learn one or more languages (including Scottish Gaelic), or explore other world cultures.

This structure gives you the chance to gain intercultural competencies in other areas of the arts, humanities and social sciences before specialising in your honours years (Years 3 and 4).

When you graduate, you will have in-depth experience working with traditional resources, modern media, digital data and some of the best linguistics and phonetics equipment in the world.