<p>Stanford has one of the best linguistics departments in the world–the NRC ranking put it at #2 (only behind MIT, but that’s debatable), others at #1.</p>
<p>The resources are awesome: they have amazing collections (the department has its own extensive collection, in addition to Stanford’s 9-million-volume library). They have various labs, such as a phonetics lab, Spoken Syntax Lab, Computational Semantics Lab, LinGO Lab, etc. See this:</p>
<p>[Stanford</a> Linguistics | Research | Current Research](<a href=“http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/research/]Stanford”>http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/research/)</p>
<p>The teachers in your classes are professors. This past quarter, I took two linguistics courses, both of whom were taught by world-renowned professors. All of the faculty are amazing, with renowned people like Joan Bresnan (pioneer of LFG), Martin Kay (very influential in machine translation, introducing the idea of chart parsing), Tom Wasow (one of the founders of the Center for the Study of Language and Information, very influential, and the symbolic systems major at Stanford), Dan Jurafsky (influential in computational linguistics, Macarthur fellow as well), Chris Manning (computational linguistics), etc.</p>
<p>Undergrads have plenty of research opportunities. There are many grads that you can get involved with, as well as the professors, who are very willing to get students involved (I emailed the department after being accepted, asking about research, and got very long, helpful answers from two very well-known people in the department). As kliviz said, research is required of juniors, and they have an honors program (research-intensive). Stanford also has paid summer research internships, which you can get after freshman year.</p>
<p>[Stanford</a> Linguistics | Undergraduate | Research Internships](<a href=“http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/undergraduate/researchinternships.shtml]Stanford”>http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/undergraduate/researchinternships.shtml)</p>
<p>Stanford has an amazing linguistics department. It was one of the reasons I applied to Stanford and why I chose it over lots of other schools with great reputations and departments in linguistics.</p>