Doctorate in Language Sciences

Language Sciences feature in different Domains at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities: English, Germanistik, Français, Multilingualism and Foreign Language Education. Doctoral research can be pursued in various fields: syntax, semantics, pragmatics, textual linguistics, cognitive linguistics, language acquisition, psycholinguistics, language teaching, dialectology, sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology.

The Department of Multilingualism and Foreign Language Education conducts research in the following areas:

• Multilingual language learning and cognitive linguistics
• Language and social inequalities, political economy and sociology of language
• Minority languages in multilingual Switzerland, languages in contact, diachronic and synchronic description of Rhaeto-romance
• Second and foreign language teaching and learning, multilingual didactics, and language testing
• Language learning and language teaching: Input and L2 development

Doctoral subjects are chosen together with the thesis supervisor. Each doctoral supervisor offers individual guidance throughout the course of the thesis. Workshops for Doctoral candidates are regularly organised by the Departments or within research groups.

Moreover, the doctoral programme in Multilingualism: acquisition, education and society funded by Swissuniversities and supported by the University of Fribourg help doctoral students to acquire research skills (in partnership with the universities of Bern and Lausanne).