Mitigating circumstances may be personal or family illness, other family circumstances, change of teachers during a course, problems with school facilities or an unusual curriculum followed by your school or college. We recommend that information on mitigating circumstances that have affected or are likely to affect your academic performance should be included in the referee's report. We cannot usually take into account information that is supplied after an adverse decision has been made on an application by the admitting School. If you encounter mitigating circumstances after you have submitted your application, please inform the admissions staff in the School to which you applied as soon as possible.

This course will introduce you to the study of the unique human faculty of language and to the investigation of the world's languages. You will explore a number of fascinating topics such as the ways in which dialects differ, how languages arise, change and die, how children acquire their first language, differences between the speech of men and women, how we communicate as individuals and within groups, and what happens when speakers of different languages come into contact.