Research within the Department is centred on Language and Culture. Particular emphasis is placed on intercultural, comparative, and historical aspects of language and culture, and the Department aims at combining methods and traditions from both basic and applied research.

Language-related research
deals with communication in general or with a specific foreign language, its structure and acquisition. The relationship between mother tongue and a foreign language is an area of particular interest, focussing on theories of argumentation and reasoning, communicative processes, discourse analysis and intercultural communication.

Culture-related research
both takes the form of general research into the history of culture, literature, and institutions, and of analyses of texts and other products of cultural and mental processes. Again much emphasis is put on the comparative aspect through investigations of similarities and differences in mentalities, historical experience and social conditions, and on how countries influence each other directly and indirectly as a consequence of intercultural interaction. Literary research includes examinations of the works of particular authors, of the methodological and theoretical aspects of literary analysis and the process of reading, and of the formation of myths and the importance of myths in relation to the culture and the society in which they are formed.

Most of the Department's senior researchers, Ph.D. students, and temporary research staff carry out their research within the framework of the research centre Centre of Languages and Intercultural Studies (CSIS) and the interfaculty Centre for Discourse Studies