The Department of General Linguistics is situated in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. The Department offers undergraduate modules in General Linguistics and Applied English Language Studies (AELS). On a postgraduate level, four Masters programmes are offered: MA in Linguistics for the Language Professions, MPhil in Second Language Studies, MPhil in Intercultural Communication, and MA in Linguistic Theory.

The Department is also involved in several research projects, focusing inter alia on intercultural discourse in health care, language shift and language change in local communities, specific language impairment in Afrikaans, English-Afrikaans code switching, and aspects of Afrikaans syntax.