Linguistics

The Department of Linguistics investigates language as a fundamental human activity. Linguists study language as a cultural, social, and psychological phenomenon, seeking to determine what is universal to all languages, what is specific to individual languages, and how language varies across individuals and communities.

As an inherently interdisciplinary field, linguistics links the humanities, the social sciences, the other cognitive sciences, computer science, education, and hearing and speech sciences. At Stanford, students and scholars explore how language is acquired, how it changes over time, and how it is processed by both humans and machines.

Academic Programs and Linguistic Training

The Department of Linguistics offers courses at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, providing structured pathways to master the core dimensions of language analysis:

• Undergraduate and Graduate Coursework: Some courses focus on the analysis of sounds (phonetics and phonology), meanings (semantics and pragmatics), words (morphology), and sentences (syntax). Others examine how these structures vary over time (historical linguistics), or over individuals and social groups (sociolinguistics), or how language is processed and learned by humans (psycholinguistics and language acquisition) or by computers (computational linguistics).

• Graduate Degrees: Offering programs leading to a Coterminal M.A., a Ph.D., and a Ph.D. minor in Linguistics. Note: The GRE is not required for admissions.

Research Frontiers and Scholarly Forums

Linguistic research at Stanford bridges theoretical analysis with empirical and computational investigations. The department hosts a variety of open forums, colloquia, and regularly scheduled workshops that serve as focal points for lively intellectual exchange in all subfields of linguistics.