Dear Colleague,
I’ve spent some time recently exploring the vital statistics of our subject: undergraduate numbers and relevant A-level numbers. The result is a short paper which you can download at https://dickhudson.com/papers/#2026. You may find it interesting for the perspective it provides on recent events such as the closure of departments because contrary to what senior management may assume, the fate of linguistics is NOT tied to that of our language departments, whereas that of English Language is definitely tied to A-level English Language. Until 2020, numbers in Linguistics were rising steadily, but since then they have fallen; it’s not clear why. Needless to say, I welcome comments.
Incidentally, the downloadable paper is the second version. The first version argued that numbers for linguistics were still healthy, but new data undermine that conclusion.
Dick Hudson
