BA Linguistics

Linguistics is the science of language. It seeks to discover the psychological and motor mechanisms of human speech, the similarities and differences among languages, how languages change, and the way in which language is acquired. Because linguistics is largely independent of fields with which the student is likely to be familiar, no special background is required for students entering the major.

Linguistics interacts with a wide variety of fields, such as articulatory phonetics (biology), acoustic phonetics (physics), field methods (anthropology), language and culture (anthropology), sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, logic, the philosophy of language, and the study of particular languages (including their history). This interaction provides opportunities for students with varied interests and can give new perspectives to those in related disciplines.