Comparative Literature and Linguistics

Comparative literature and linguistics is a combination that approaches language and literature from two different but deeply complementary angles. Comparative literature asks what we learn when we read across languages, cultures, national traditions, and genres, examining how texts in dialogue across different linguistic and cultural contexts reveal things that single-tradition study cannot. Linguistics asks how language itself works, as a system of sound, grammar, meaning, and social use, and what it means that human beings everywhere have language while no other species does.

Studying them together means you are always attending both to how language works as a system and to what particular authors and texts do with that system.

At Queen Mary University of London, this four-year, full-time degree develops both disciplines in parallel, with the comparative literature strand exploring narratives across times, places, and forms, engaging with the most important issues of history, politics, film, gender, and more through the lens of storytelling, while the linguistics strand develops your systematic understanding of phonology, grammar, semantics, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics. Queen Mary has research strengths in both areas, and the programme benefits from that depth of expertise. The typical entry tariff of 136 points reflects strong academic expectations at a research-intensive London university.

Graduates of comparative literature and linguistics go on to careers in publishing, journalism, education, translation and interpreting, the civil service, communications, the cultural sector, and academia. Many find roles in applied linguistics, language teaching, or lexicography. Others use the combination of close reading skills and systematic language analysis in fields such as speech technology, natural language processing, or language assessment.

Academic careers in either comparative literature or linguistics require postgraduate study, and the programme provides an excellent foundation for doctoral research in either field or at their intersection.