Multilingualism

• The programme is taught in Leeuwarden (European Cultural Capital 2018), in the bilingual province of Fryslân, which offers easy access to multilingual communities, research organizations and a vibrant student life
• Many opportunities for challenging regional, national and international internships
• Intensive working collaborations between staff and students. You will mostly be taught in small groups, by leading experts in an inspiring and truly international teaching-learning environment

• High employability rate of our alumni

Upon graduation students hold a (60 ECTS) MA degree in Linguistics with a track in Multilingualism from the University of Groningen. A student's career after that depends on the kind of person they are. The field of multilingualism is open for enterprising minds. Being one of the main challenges in a globalizing world, multilingualism creates many issues, situations and problems that can be solved only by experts.

Language is central to studying human behaviour and activities. A degree in Linguistics can therefore also see you into a career in related fields such psychology, social-, computer- or education sciences. Many of the skills a Linguistics MA teaches are transferable. You will probably find that your analytical competence, ability to write, and capacity to solve problems will significantly improve after completing an MA degree.

We encourage our students to complete a 10 EC internship in a field of their interest. In the first term of the MA, a career event is organized to give students information and resources to realize their internship.

With your MA-degree you could become a diversity manager, policy consultant, or an advisor to (inter)national governmental organizations and NGOs. You could also become an expert on dealing with multilingualism in education and companies, or on advising government agencies on language policies. You may also choose to pursue a career as lecturer or researcher in higher education.

Through a combination of a research-driven approach and knowledge of applying theory to real life situations, our programme prepares students for the following jobs:

The Multilingualism Laboratory

The Dutch northern provinces carry a long tradition of research into multilingualism, especially the Fryslan province. These regions have been a multilingual area for centuries, where closely related endogenous languages and language varieties co-exist with exogenous varieties like English, German and Low-Saxon. Since the 1960s many immigrant languages, mainly belonging to different language families, have been added to this repertoire. The standardisation and official recognition of Frisian as a national language have resulted in a rather extensive infrastructure of language research, for instance on the fields of cultural heritage, education and language policy. Thus, Fryslân and the other northern provinces of the Netherlands offer an excellent natural setting for conducting ground-breaking multidisciplinary research on multilingualism.

We believe that a multidisciplinary approach is the only answer to the many questions multilingualism confronts us with. That is why our research groups are encouraged to closely collaborate and inspire each other, fueling innovative solutions, recommendations, and policy advice. By combining approaches from different backgrounds, (fundamental) research on multilingualism becomes truly innovative, able to combine societal needs with scientific questions.

Research areas

The research on multilingualism innovatively combines cognitive, sociological and technological approaches to language in a natural setting. Research areas are:

Language, Cognition, and Variation: Investigating language processing in the individual’s mind in combination with language variation in a multilingual society, and its consequences for language change and language learning, with the intention to develop new techniques to facilitate language learning.

Language, Equity and Social Justice: Investigating how language in societies, schools or organisations can contribute to equity, peace and social justice and how forms of linguistic discrimination (linguicism, accentism or racism) can lead to inequity.