This Masters will equip you with the key linguistic and technical research skills to explore the structure and everyday use of English, past and present, from early medieval manuscripts to Renaissance letters, from speech to semantics, from language experiments to investigating vast text corpora. If you have little or no background in English Language and Linguistics, we have a range of introductory courses which progress to more advanced courses, allowing you to develop theoretical and methodological background for you to carry out your own research study. If you have taken language and linguistics courses before, and want to deepen your interests, we offer advanced courses which will allow you to deepen your existing understanding and skills, to carry out your own research project. You can study options from a wide range of historical and contemporary areas of English Language and Linguistics. Its flexibility allows you to tailor the course to your own interests, so you can gain research expertise and key linguistic, technical, and study skills in the analysis of spoken and written English across all periods of English. We cater both for students who have little or no background in linguistics and also for students with a background in language and linguistics who wish to carry out more sophisticated independent research in a particular area. Your courses will be taught by expert academic staff who have directed and are currently directing research projects (e.g. Seeing Speech, Sounds of the City, One Speaker Two Dialects, the Scots Syntax Atlas (SCOSYA), Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech (SCOTS) among others).Some students take our programme as a secondment from an ongoing teaching or professional education position. Others continue into employment in language teaching, journalism, or other kinds of industrial or commercial research. The programme is also an excellent foundation to doctoral research.