Linguistics in tandem with another subject at the University of Adelaide

Linguistics can complement, or can be complemented by, studies in a wide range of Arts, Sciences and Professions at the University of Adelaide.

The areas that have been commonly studied alongside linguistics by our past and current students include the following:

• Languages: any one or more of the modern/Classical languages offered at the University of Adelaide.
• Aboriginal Studies: Aboriginal languages are fundamental to identity and culture. They are becoming increasingly important within Aboriginal Studies with the flourishing language revival programs that have emerged over the last few decades.
• Writing: to deepen understanding of how written language draws from, and where it differs from, natural spoken language.
• Media: Conversational analysis and rhetoric are areas shared by media and linguistics. Media provides corpora as the basis of many linguistic studies.
• Psychology: particularly for those with an interest in language and wellbeing, child language development, language processing. Psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics are important subdisciplines in Linguistics.
• Speech Pathology: Linguistics, and especially phonetics and phonology, is a core component in the training and practice of speech pathologists. Some of our students have gone on to study speech pathology after majoring in Linguistics.
• Law: particularly for those with an interest in linguistic human rights, and semantics (the study of meaning), which plays a central role in court trials.
• Criminology: for example for those interested in the fascinating and multifaceted field of forensic linguistics.
• Education: possibly alongside languages for those planning to be language teachers, or with early childhood education for an understanding of language development.
• Anthropology: to gain a deeper understanding of the relationships between language and culture. Linguistics provides unique tools for anthropological fieldwork.
• Sociology: to gain a deeper understanding of the relationships between language and society.
• History: especially mission linguistics.
• Philosophy: especially for those interested in the philosophy of language and the ways in which concepts are encoded through language (semantics and pragmatics).
• Music: especially for those interested in using music and song as a means of teaching languages, especially in the context of revival of Indigenous languages.
• Computers: for those with an interest in computer languages, computational linguistics and information retrieval.
• Mathematics: for those with an interest in language structure and modelling.
• Architecture: language plays an important role in the built environment. The study of the linguistic landscape is an emerging subdiscipline in Linguistics.
• Physics: especially for those with an interest in the acoustics of speech.
• Commerce: to gain a deeper understanding of cross-cultural communication and the nexus between language and globalization. 

Learn more about what languages are available to study here.