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).

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.

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: 

1. conducting cutting-edge research on language structure, acquisition, and processing
2. preparing students to achieve personal and professional goals equipped with the knowledge and skills developed through the study of linguistics.

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.