What is linguistics?

What will I study as a linguistics major or minor?

What opportunities will I have with a linguistics degree?

For answers to these questions and more, see the following websites:

- the Linguistics Society of America (LSA) Why Major in Linguistics page

- a list of sample jobs provided by the Department of Linguistics at the University of New Hampshire (UNH)

- a Wall Street Journal article on the marketability of a linguistics degree, available on Boston University's Linguistics website

SO, TO SUMMARIZE:

WHY WOULD I MAJOR IN LINGUISTICS?

Linguistics graduates have built careers in foreign service, international business, translation and interpreting, lexicography, teaching English as a Second Language in the US and abroad, information technology, technical writing and publishing. Students who augment their linguistics training with computer science classes are highly valued by companies that develop natural-language processing tools for speech recognition, speech synthesis, automatic translation and information retrieval.

Linguistics students are also well equipped for further training in many fields, including some already mentioned: Anthropology, International Affairs, Law, Journalism, Communication, Speech, Language and Hearing Science, Computer Science, Education, foreign languages, Philosophy and Psychology. And of course, linguistics majors often pursue graduate study in linguistics and closely related areas, including psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, computational linguistics, neurolinguistics and speech pathology.

I'M ALREADY COMMITTED TO A PRIMARY MAJOR; WHY WOULD I ADD LINGUISTICS AS A SECOND MAJOR, OR AS A MINOR?

Because a primary major from an appropriate field that is augmented with linguistics will place you in a stronger position for pursuing graduate studies or professional careers in a wide variety of fields (see the LSA and UNH pages above for examples of these). Even if you do not intend to work in a language-related profession, you can benefit from the study of linguistics: business and industry employers are increasingly aware that linguistics majors have well developed skills in complex problem solving (see the Wall Street Journal article above) - and so are the admissions committees of graduate programs.

Simply put, a second major or minor in linguistics adds value to your primary major.