Course content and focus areas
The focus of the Master’s degree in Empirical Linguistics is on the in-depth expertise and methods that are necessary to explore and analyse natural human languages with empirical procedures. It covers both modern and ancient human languages and aims to describe aspects that are specific to these languages as well as general aspects of language and speech, to classify these aspects on the basis of typology and historical genetics and to explain them. Research into these languages covers their usage as “spoken languages” in everyday communication processes on the one hand, but on the other all written forms of natural languages used, thereby taking into account and focusing particularly on the literary traditions linked to these languages, their socio-historical conditions of use or other phenomena linked to their usage.