possible Linguistics major?

tk21769
Wed, 17 Sep 2014 11:20:28 +0000

Not many students are exposed to linguistics courses until they get to college. The best foundation in HS would be pretty much the same college-preparatory foundation expected for any other liberal arts major. Try to include 4 full years of language study. Some sub-fields of linguistics (the scientific study of language) can be fairly math intensive. Especially if you might be interested in computational linguistics, include 4 full years of mathematics with the most advanced courses you can take.

Linguistics is a broad, interdisciplinary field that has been informed by anthropology, traditional philology, biology, mathematics, symbolic logic and other branches of philosophy, etc. I wouldn’t necessarily rule out small liberal arts colleges, but they usually will not be able to cover such a variety of fields as well as research universities can. Nor can LACs offer very many courses in a wide variety of foreign languages beyond the standard high-density languages (i.e. French, German, Spanish … maybe Russian, Italian, Chinese). So if you think you want to dig into the study of low density languages, pidgins and creoles, historical languages/dialects, or anything else fairly uncommon, better stick to a research university.

Different programs have different strengths (historical linguistics, computational linguistics, semantics, etc.) but the research universities with the strongest overall programs probably include:

MIT, Harvard, UPenn, Stanford, Chicago (Ivies and other very selective private universities)
UCLA, Berkeley, Michigan, UMass, Maryland, Ohio State (large state universities)

LACs that seem to have strong linguistics departments include Swarthmore, Pomona and Reed.

This isn’t an exhaustive list. Most of the private schools I’m mentioning are very selective. If you’re interested in another school, check its course catalog. Make sure courses are offered in all the major linguistics sub-fields (phonetics/phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, historical/diachronic linguistics) or any other areas that interest you. Make sure there are faculty members covering each of these areas (not one professor covering several distinct sub-fields).

http://chronicle.com/article/NRC-Rankings-Overview-/124741/
http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/university-subject-rankings/2012/linguistics
(These are graduate program rankings, which won’t necessarily apply perfectly to undergraduate programs. However, you at least can be confident that the high-ranking programs will cover the field well with courses and faculty.)