Language and Society

Plurilingualism and multilingualism

This course introduces students to core academic skills essential for conducting research in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Students will learn how to formulate research questions, locate and evaluate scholarly sources, and apply appropriate qualitative and quantitative methods. Emphasis is placed on critical thinking, academic writing, and ethical research practices. Students who choose Language & Society for the second part of this course, will be introduced to methods in linguistics particularly relevant to multilingual speakers and communities. While addressing topics such as minority language politics, code switching, and communication between speakers of European languages, we study different approaches to linguistic research, such as questionnaires, focus group interviews, and experimental designs.

Structure and Variation

This course introduces you to the basics of language structure. How do (European) languages work? What do they have in common and where do they differ? We discuss their sound systems, their morphology (i.e. how words are formed from smaller units) and their syntax (how sentences are formed from words). By the end of this course you will understand why English speakers pronounce key, ski, car, and scar all with different "k" sounds, or how Dutch speakers can form ridiculously long words like kindercarnavalsoptochtvoorbereidingswerkzaamhedencomitéleden.

Language Learning

We are all language learners! Be it as children when we learn our first language(s) or when we learn another language after that. But how does that work? What are the mechanisms behind this process, and how does our learning differ from that of other species? Also, we will discuss how this relates to what your language teachers do in class, and you will learn what makes language learners more successful.

Research Methods

You will get introduced to the differences and similarities of qualitative and quantitative research and everything in between, learn to formulate better research questions and hypotheses, and get an introduction to corpus linguistics and questionnaire design, allowing you to answer questions such as: how are men and women talked about in current American TV shows? How do you measure someone’s attitudes reliably? And, finally, how do we evaluate quantitative results using basic statistics?

Language in the Mind

This course will introduce you to the world of psycholinguistics. Psycholinguistic research is concerned with the question of how our mind processes language. We will discuss recent theories of how language is organized in the brain, how the different brain areas contribute to language processing, what types of language disorders exist and why, and we will familiarize ourselves with some of the methods that are frequently used to explore language in the mind.

In your last year, you will write your Bachelor thesis on the topic of your choice. Some examples from previous Language and Society European Languages and Cultures graduates thesis topics are:

• “Gendered and Genderless Languages: Differences in Identity Formation in Bilingual Non-Binary Individuals”
• “Language Attitudes Towards and Use of Frisian by Native Frisian Youth”
• “Un análisis comparativo de los procesos de revitalización lingüística del euskera y del catalán”
• Samiskans vitalitet: attityder, medier, och internet
• Könsneutrala pronomina i Sverige och Nederländerna: användning och attityder
• De hijo de puta a klootzak. Un estudio comparativo sobre las connotaciones culturales de las palabrotas en español y neerlandés
• Analyzing the death of the subjunctive. The emergence of neo-standard Italian
• „Begriepst mi?“ - Die gegenseitige Verständlichkeit zwischen Gronings und Ostfriesisch
• Cross-Linguistic Influence on Lexical Retrieval in Dutch-Spanish Multilinguals: a tip-of-the-tongue study
• Assoziationen im Bilingualismus: Über das konzeptionelle Denkvermögen von bilingualen Sprechern