As the world’s second most spoken language, Mandarin Chinese and its associated cultures have helped to shape the contemporary world in many ways.This joint honours programme gives you the opportunity to study Chinese while developing your social scientific understanding of language.Chinese and Linguistics make an excellent joint honours choice by combining the study of:a language in its cultural, historical and political contextthe expression and creation of meaningLinguistics courses of particular relevance to language students cover:the speech sounds of the world's languagesvariation in the languages of the worldthe structure and history of world languagesEdinburgh is the only university in Scotland to offer both single and joint honours undergraduate programmes in Chinese.While we specialise in teaching students with little or no prior knowledge of the language, we can also accommodate students who already have some experience of studying Chinese.Linguistics examines how language works, describing how sounds, words, sentences and conversations combine to express and create meaning.You will also study:the uses of language in everyday lifethe ways in which language varies across society and evolves over timehow language is mastered by childrenAs you progress through the programme, you will have the opportunity to plan and test scientific hypotheses about linguistic phenomena using specialist linguistics and phonetics equipment.