Department of Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of language.  We seek to understand the structure of language, how it is learned, how it changes over time, how it interacts with the world, how it is represented in the mind, and how humans produce and understand language.

Our work informs a wide variety of human concerns: education (foreign-language teaching, the way to approach standard and non-standard languages in the classroom), technology (speech recognition, artificial intelligence), health care (diagnosis and treatment of language disorders), language's place in a diverse society (the role of multilingualism, protections for endangered and minority dialects and languages), and the legal system (interpreting legal language and the significance of linguistic evidence).