Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of language. Why can you say ‘spark’ but not ‘psark’, ‘unbelievable’ but not ‘unteacher’, ‘Who do you wanna see?’ but not ‘Who do you wanna feed the dog?’ and, in the year 2007, ‘That website is phat’ but not ‘That website is groovy’? Linguists want to know the answers to these questions. Linguists study sounds, words, sentences, stories, and conversations.

Is Linguistics for you?

Linguistics is for students who would like to help build internet search engines or understand how suspects respond when police question them. It is for students who want to learn how sounds are produced in our mouths, and discover why many English words are hard to spell.

Linguistics is also for students who want to study the formal properties
of sound systems and grammatical structures, to explore why it is so difficult to learn a foreign language or learn how neuroimaging (fMRI and EEG) methods look inside the brain to show us how language is processed.

Areas of study

Linguistics offers courses about sounds (phonetics and phonology), words (morphology), sentences (syntax), narratives and conversations (discourse analysis), and meaning (semantics and pragmatics). We also have courses about language learning and teaching, computational linguistics, neurolinguistics, sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, universals and typology, language and the law, and First Nations languages.

Degree offered: BA

Language/ESL Teacher; Speech Therapist, Audiologist; Computational Linguist; Translator; Education and academia; Editor/Publisher; Journalist; Librarian; Law and international organizations; Analyst or researcher; Immigration Officer ; International development agencies