Pomerantz Career Center

Linguistics is the scientific study of human languages, which are highly complex systems. Areas of study include word structure (morphology), speech sounds (phonetics) and their patterns of combination and contrast (phonology), sentence structure (syntax), and meaning relations (semantics).

Linguists study well-known and familiar languages, such as English, Spanish, Russian, and Chinese. They also study less well-known languages and even those languages about which little has been discovered.

The description of formal patterns of human language has a number of applications. Linguistics is connected to psychology, and to speech and hearing, in studying how children learn language, how speakers process and interpret language, and how injuries and disorders affect both production and perception of speech. It is linked with anthropology and other social sciences in studying how language use relates to culture, region, class, and gender. Linguists and computer scientists collaborate to construct computational representations of syntax and semantics for processing natural languages.

People with linguistic training teach English as a second language and help clinicians retrain people with linguistic disabilities. Some help design school programs for minority groups or intelligence and achievement tests. Linguists also work in occupations related to law, the computer industry, and foreign languages.

In industry, high tech companies regularly hire people with linguistics degrees (especially if they have some kind of computational background).  Such jobs may involve exciting, cutting edge research that pays well. Such companies also often have summer jobs for undergrads and beginning grads which can be an excellent first step on the road to a secure career.

Another area that may interest some people is government work such as a Special Agent Linguist for the FBI. With a linguistics major plus fluency in some language, you become quite attractive for that sort of work.