COVID-19 Updates
Please click the link to find information on recent changes for our students and affiliated faculty related to COVID-19.
Antiracism Statement
We will engage students in thoughtful conversations about race and racism to create an antiracist community.
What Linguistics Is and What Linguists Do...
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).
Humanities Radio
For more information, we encourage you to listen to Episode 2 of the Humanities podcast, where Aaron Kaplan, Assistant Professor of Linguistics, answers all of these questions.
Mission Statement
The Department of Linguistics at the University of Utah is committed to advancing the understanding of human language in the service of local, national, and global communities.
We accomplish this by:
- conducting cutting-edge research on language structure, acquisition, and processing
- preparing students to achieve personal and professional goals equipped with the knowledge and skills developed through the study of linguistics.
Our Specializations and Interests
In the Department of Linguistics at the University of Utah, our faculty specialize in:
- theoretical syntax and semantics
- theoretical phonology
- second language acquisition
- second language phonology
Our faculty also have interests in historical linguistics, psycholinguistics, and sociolinguistics. We offer undergraduate, MA, and PhD degrees, as well as a computational linguistics certificate and a TESOL certificate.
About the Department
Linguistics provides the intellectual satisfaction of learning how human language works, while at the same time developing the analytical skills necessary to be highly competitive on the job market. Students in linguistics learn how to analyze languages and develop crucial skills for today’s job market: reasoning, critical thinking, rigorous analysis, and written and verbal communication.
Graduates of our program have been admitted to some of the top graduate programs in linguistics and other fields and found careers in ESL instruction, language analysis, and computational linguistics.
LEARN MORE ABOUT THE DEPARTMENT OF LinguisticsGet Involved
News
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Undergraduate Student Britta Bolander to Present at 11th Values in Medicine, Science, and Technology Conference
Britta Bolander will present at the 11th Values in Medicine, Science, and Technology Conference, to be held at The University of Texas at Dallas May 23-25, 2023. The title of her talk is: Problematizing Machine Learning’s Cognitive Metaphor: Implications and Alternatives This talk is the outcome of Britta's Spring UROP project, co-mentored by Aniello De Santo and Joyce Havstad (Dept. of Philosophy).
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The Mathematics of Language and Cognition Lab will be represented at this year's meeting of the Society for Computation in Linguistics with a talk and three posters!
- "Extending Finite-state Models of Reduplication to Tone in Thai". Casey David Miller, Aniello De Santo - "Evaluating a Phonotactic Learner for MITSL(2,2) Languages". Jacob Kyle Johnson, Aniello De Santo - "An MG Parsing View into the Processing of Subject and Object Relative Clauses in Basque". Matteo Fiorini, Jillian Chang, Aniello De Santo - "Processing French RCs with Postverbal Subjects in a Minimalist Parser".Daniel Del Valle, Aniello De Santo
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Mohammed Al-Alriqy Awarded Steffensen Cannon Fellowship.
Ph.D Student Mohammed Al-Ariqy has been awarded the Steffensen Cannon Fellowship. This scholarship enables students to pursue excellence in their chosen fields of Education and Humanities, without the burden of employment.
