Hi, I’m trying to find a college with a good linguistics program. I’m not worried about price and my grades are pretty good so that’s not a major concern either. I don’t care about country/location as long as they speak preferably English, or Spanish/German. I’m not entirely sure what I intend to do with my degree so no preference towards programs geared toward a specific career. Which colleges have the best linguistics (I’m most interested in grammar/syntax type stuff) programs?
Sounds like you are international.
You likely need to lean more into schools you’ll qualify vs grades are pretty good.
There’s various lists. I suggest you look school by school at curriculums and requirements to see which matches your interests.
Note rankings will be different. The first link has UMASS high in the world. The second doesn’t list them as top 50 in the US.
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You may not be worried about price, but if you are an international student, you will need to show that you have the money to pay for college when you apply for a student visa. So it might be worth an hour of your time researching student visas and college costs before you go too far down the road.
If you are not an international student- ignore my advice.
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It seems like you would be interested in morphology as well, then.
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Paging @dfbdfb.
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So yes, as others have said, it sounds like you’re coming in from outside the US? Either way, though, if you’re casting an international net, I’ll say that there are definitely some excellent programs in linguistics in the US, Canada, Germany, Austria, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand—so you have a range of locations to choose from, and you’d be able to get a good foundation in syntax any of those places. (I’m less familiar with linguistics in the Hispanosphere—I know there are very good programs, I just don’t know their coverage.)
If you were interested in sociolinguistics or computational linguistics or such, you might have to be a bit more careful about where you ended up looking, but with an interest in (morpho)syntax, you can honestly go anywhere that does linguistics and you’ll be fine—effectively any undergrad program in linguistics (that is, as a linguistics major, not something like an English major with a linguistics emphasis) will give you the opportunity to do coursework in syntax, which is not the case for other subfields except maybe phonology.
One important decision you’ll need to make is whether you’re more interested in the UK or the US model of higher education. (Where the UK model is found in the UK, of course, but also in Australia and New Zealand, while the US model is found in the US and in at least most Canadian universities. The US model is ultimately derived from the 19th-century German model, but the German model has evolved since to what is effectively a sort of middle ground between the UK and US.)
The UK model is well known for allowing students to focus more in depth on their major fields with less of a broad-based set of additional courses (read: general education requirements), but that filters down to content of the major, as well—UK linguistics programs tend to specialize earlier than US linguistics programs, so you’d get more of a chance to focus on syntax, but at the cost of learning more about the rest of the field. It also means that the research focuses of the faculty at UK-model institutions are more important for an undergrad than at US-model institutions—you can focus on syntax no matter where you go, but a UK-model institution where the faculty are primarily in, say, sociolinguistics and corpus linguistics won’t let you make as deep of a dive. In a US-model institution, you don’t get really that focused til the master’s level, so it isn’t an issue at all.
TL;DR: If you’re interested in syntax, you should be able to go anywhere and get what you want, as long as it’s an actual linguistics major and not a focus within another major.
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Take a close look at UMass Amherst. They have a very strong undergrad and grad linguistics dep’t. Also, as a state school, their total cost of attendance would probably be about 60K, maybe 45K if they give you a merit scholarship.
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