BA Linguistics

This major would allow students to receive a BA degree in Linguistics. Linguistics, which is the study of language as a structural, cognitive, historical, and cultural phenomenon, intersects with many different academic disciplines and career paths. Linguists study how people acquire their knowledge of a language (or multiple languages), how this knowledge interacts with other cognitive processes, and how best to model this knowledge. They study how to represent the structure of the various aspects of language (such as sounds or meaning), how to account for different linguistic patterns theoretically, and how the different components of language interact with each other. Since every language is spoken across multiple communities of practice, linguists also study variation in language based on region, ethnicity, gender, or any number of other social factors. In order to learn about as many of the world's 7000 languages as possible, many linguists do fieldwork. This means that they work with speakers of little-studied languages to discover grammatical patterns and/or to document the language. Other linguists search databases (or corpora) of spoken and written language to find patterns there. Yet others run carefully-designed experiments with children and adults in schools, in the field, and in university labs. Linguistics is the scientific study of language in all its complexity.