Program Overview

Intercultural communication is crucial to comprehending the world of today and participating in the world of tomorrow. Globalisation has led to greater centrality of knowledge and information. Different linguistic communities have ever-increasing contact – through migration, tourism, education, and information and media flows – yet linguistic and cultural barriers persist.

As language and intercultural exchanges become more frequent and diverse, and the media that carry these exchanges proliferate, keen intercultural communication skills are now more crucial than ever.  

In this course, you will explore how the linguistic forms and patterns within a language give expression to a culture’s worldview, sociocultural norms and values. You’ll approach linguistic communication as a cultural practice, used to both create and sustain our sense of personal, cultural and national identities. You’ll use a variety of different analytic approaches, ranging from discourse analysis and anthropological linguistics to semiotics and cross-cultural pragmatics. You will also study digital technologies which increasingly mediate international human communication, and constitute one of the key infrastructures that enable and inflect global cultural interchange. Our students come from across the globe and this makes our seminars particularly engaging – you’ll take part in fascinating cross-cultural exchanges both with your peers and your tutors.  

To succeed on this course, you do not need to have any pre-existing theoretical knowledge as our students come from a range of linguistic, academic and vocational backgrounds.  For example, you might already have studied or worked in sectors such as business, development studies, education, hospitality and tourism, law, management, marketing, psychology, or medicine, and you want to develop the intercultural communication skills that will help you in your future working life. You might have previously studied for an undergraduate degree in English, history, geography, media, or politics, and you now want to combine your previous studies to develop an interdisciplinary view of language, culture and communication. Or you might speak several languages or you might have lived abroad, and you now want to explore the academic underpinnings of your experiences.