U of U Giving Colleges and SchoolsCollege of Humanities Department of Linguistics
College of Humanities
College of Humanities

Department of Linguistics

Department of Linguistics

Linguistics provides the intellectual satisfaction of learning how human language works while at the same time developing the analytical skills necessary to be highly competitive in the job market. Students in linguistics learn how to analyze languages and develop crucial skills for today’s job market: reasoning, critical thinking, rigorous analysis, and written and verbal communication. Graduates of our program have been admitted to some of the top graduate programs in linguistics and other fields and found careers in ESL instruction, language analysis, and computational linguistics.

The Department of Linguistics is a small department offering close faculty interaction. Almost all of our courses have small enrollments. As linguists, we put language under the microscope to provide insight into various aspects of this uniquely human ability. We offer courses that examine language and languages from diverse angles, including their sounds (phonetics and phonology), their ways of forming words (morphology), their sentence structures (syntax), their systems of expressing meaning (semantics), how children and adults acquire them, and language variation in different social and cultural contexts.

Linguistics is closely connected to many other fields, such as philosophy, psychology, biology, and English. Linguistics courses are an excellent way for majors in other departments to broaden their academic experience.

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