Linguistics

Program Description

Linguists explore all things to do with language: its structure and mechanics, how language and the mind interact, and the tie between language and socio-cultural factors. Linguistics is an ideal major for today’s university students.  It provides the intellectual satisfaction of learning how human language works, while at the same time developing crucial skills for today’s job market: reasoning, critical thinking, quantitative and qualitative analysis methods, and written and verbal communication. The Linguistics Department offers a BA, a BS, and a minor, and students may also simultaneously pursue a TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) and/or Computational Linguistics certificate.  Linguistics is a broad field that welcomes people with a vast range of interests including psychology and cognitive science, video games, data science, teaching languages, computer science, philosophy, language preservation, acoustic analysis, speech therapy, and more.

The Student Experience

The department offers a number of involvement and enrichment opportunities for students. Join the Linguistics Club for Undergrads to meet fellow linguistics students, participate in an experiment or conduct research in the Speech Acquisition Lab, gain research experience under the mentorship of linguistics faculty in departmental lab groups or as a participant in the UROP program, or present your work at the University of Utah Student Conference in Linguistics (UUSCIL).  Students are also encouraged to attend departmental events, such as colloquia and thesis defenses. The program also offers volunteer, tutor, and mentoring opportunities to ensure that students gain varied knowledge, skills, and experience.

Career Opportunities

A BA or BS in Linguistics will prepare you for careers in research, higher education, and teaching. Linguists are also excellent candidates for jobs in technical fields, such as creating language interfaces for computers or developing artificial intelligence. If you decide to continue your education at the graduate level, you could become a speech pathologist, data analyst, language engineer, research scientist, professor, translator, or lawyer. Government work as an interpreter and translator is available, or you can even go to Hollywood to train actors in dialects or pronunciation. Recent graduates of our program have been admitted to some of the top graduate programs in linguistics and other fields and have found careers in ESL (English as a Second Language) instruction, language analysis, data science, and computational linguistics.

More Info

• Department of Linguistics
• College of Humanities
• Department Advising
• U Career Success

Catalog

• Linguistics BA/BS
• Linguistics Minor

Exploratory Classes

• LING 1069 - @#$!: Bad Words & Taboo Terms
• LING 2200 - Intro to the Study of Language