Best undergraduate linguistics programs?

College Search & Selection
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Hi guys!

I’m a current junior who has just started the college search, so I’d love your input on which universities have the best programs for my intended major!

I am biracial with two immigrant parents and fluent in four languages, so from a young age, I have been very passionate about language – especially how culture, geography and demographics have influenced spread/interpretation of the Indo-European language family, and specifically of the Romance languages. I definitely want to study linguistics in college, perhaps in tandem with English, and my ideal school would have to have strong programs in historical/diachronic and sociolinguistics – and, of course, give me room to do my own research.

Just to give you some context as to what kind of schools I’m thinking about: I attend one of the top “feeder” boarding schools in the country (no prizes for guessing which one!). I’m in the top 20% of my class, a published freelance journalist (I’ve written about teenagers and technology for some major websites and even international print magazines), and have a 2250 SAT (first sitting).

I’ve heard Swarthmore, Northwestern, UChicago, and Berkeley have good departments, but I’d love to get your input on those schools and more. I will be driving around the East Coast with some friends this winter break to look at schools, so I’d love to hear about some colleges I could go see then.

Thanks so much,
Ally

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What can your family afford?

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MODERATOR’S NOTE:

That was not the question. The OP did state that s/he will do further research, which will include finances. Do not derail thread.

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Good programs in the northeast:

Boston U
Brandeis
Brown
*Cornell
Dartmouth
^Georgetown
*Harvard
NYU
^Penn
U Rochester
Yale

*Indo-European powerhouse
^Sociolinguistics powerhouse

In the South, there’s Emory, Rice, and Tulane. On the west coast, USC and Stanford.

If you can afford the OOS tuition, UCLA, Ohio State, UMD College Park, UCSD, Michigan, and UT Austin are particularly strong among public universities.

There’s quite a few good programs in Canada, including the usual suspects like Toronto and UBC, but Concordia is a hidden gem for IE linguistics.

Liberal arts colleges – Yes, Swarthmore is good for linguistics. Reed is very strong, and Carleton and Macalester are decent. Linguistics offerings among LACs are otherwise pretty slim. One could also consider Haverford and Bryn Mawr (cross-registration with Penn and Swat) and the 5 Colleges (cross-registration with the superb program at U Mass-Amherst).

General advice: At the very least, an undergrad should have a solid grounding in syntax, morphology, phonology, phonetics, semantics, and historical linguistics – so look for those courses. Be sure to investigate how often they’ve been offered. (Look at the actual course schedules for each term, not just the course listings/undergraduate bulletin, which often include courses that haven’t been offered in years.) Courses like sociolinguistics, computational linguistics, neurolinguistics, and language acquisition are nice, but those skills can be developed in grad school.

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That’s a damn fine answer.

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Thank you so much for the excellent advice! Best wishes x

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I’d add a couple schools to the ones mentioned above. Chicago (in the past, at least) has been especially strong in historical linguistics. Whether it’s as strong as Harvard/Berkeley/Michigan in this area these days, I’m not sure. Any discussion of good linguistics departments also should include MIT.

Pomona is another LAC that seems to have a relatively strong program.

Usually, I’d recommend choosing a college based more on the school overall than the major.
Students often change majors; it’s hard to assess specific program quality at the undergraduate level.
However, if you’re serious about linguistics, you do need to be aware that even some excellent colleges (including most LACs) don’t have very robust linguistics departments. Most schools mentioned in post #3 are either very selective private schools or top state flagships. So, some students serious about linguistics may have trouble finding a true admission/financial safety school (if they don’t live in a state with a public university strong in this field.)

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It is not that hard to screen out some unsuitable schools based on obvious criteria like, desired major does not exist, or desired major course offerings are minimal and infrequently offered. However, assessing undergraduate program quality between several schools which offer the major with a reasonable looking selection of course offerings (and/or external major-specific accreditation, if applicable for the major) is more difficult, and may require assistance of someone knowledgeable in the subject in question to evaluate course syllabi, faculty activity, etc…

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The OP’s interest in linguistics is quite specific in that it relates to the Indo-European languages particularly. Without this consideration, which in some ways seems more relevant to graduate than undergraduate study, more programs than those highlighted thus far can be seen as offering a sound grounding in linguistic principles of universal application. Linguistics, for that matter, can be seen as a subfield of cultural anthropology, and I’m not sure how a search for excellence in one of these fields can be undertaken without a consideration of the other.

Eliminating geographic restrictions for the moment, consider, among others, Bryn Mawr, Chicago, Grinnell, Hamilton, Harvard, Haverford, Pomona and Reed.

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Questionable Hamilton aside, it’s true that other colleges provide decent backgrounds in linguistics. UGA is quite solid, for instance, and I know several very good Indo-Europeanists who’ve come from there. My list includes the most notable programs, but it was not meant to be comprehensive.

Wholly incorrect.

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“Wholly incorrect.” (9)

Your mistake is somewhat understandable, in that some may not realize that the fields of linguistics and linguistic anthropology (an indisputable subfield of cultural anthropology) have converged over the course of, well, 100 years, as these definitions should make clear:

linguistics: The scientific study of language and its structure, including the study of morphology, syntax, phonetics and semantics.

linguistic anthropology: the interdisciplinary study of how language influences social life. It is a branch of anthropology that originated from the endeavor to document endangered languages, and has grown over the past 100 years to encompass most language structure and use.

Either of these two fields could potentially relate to the OP’s interest in “culture, geography and demographics” and “sociolinguistics.” However, it is the anthropological field that more broadly overlaps with these stated interests.

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warblersrule, isn’t MIT also good at Linguistics? Don’t know much about the program, but I assumed with the likes of Chomsky, they would be solid.

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^ The characterization really depends on what period, school, or sub-field of “linguistics” we’re talking about (or on the OP’s specific interests).

Descriptive pre-Chomsky linguists (the American structuralists, including Edward Sapir) were influenced by anthropology, or were actual anthropologists. Pre-Chomsky, linguists approached one language after another as a set of behaviors associated with specific cultures, as revealed through field work with native-speaker informants. Post-Chomsky (since the 1957 publication of Syntactic Structures), theoretical linguists in the USA have approached Language as an innate faculty, with an underlying universal structure (irrespective of surface differences of expression), shared by all human beings, as revealed by rational introspection. Cultural anthropologists is precisely what they are NOT.

If you’re into computational linguistics, you’d want to consider a school’s computer science offerings, but you could fairly ignore its anthropology/sociology programs. If you’re interested in historical linguistics or sociolinguistics, you may indeed want to consider the cultural anthropology or sociology programs.

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@tk21769: Chomsky himself has stated that we may only need access to two, or possibly three, languages in order to have an acceptable basis for the understanding of certain aspects of linguistics. This tends to confirm the separation between some of the branches of linguistics/anthropology to which you referred. Therefore, my usage of “convergence” (10) was not applicable to all branches of linguistics as they relate to all branches of cultural anthropology. And, as you indicated, divergence may in fact have occurred through time between certain linguistic/anthropological sub-branches.

That said, the areas of linguistics the OP has thus far indicated an interest in overlap strongly with the subfield of cultural/social anthropology and, as well, with the sub-branch of linguistic anthropology. The OP therefore “may indeed want to consider the cultural anthropology or sociology programs” (12) of schools of potential interest. For strong anthropology/sociology/linguistics, I would add Pitzer to the sampling of colleges mentioned in post 8.

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UCLA is fantastic.

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“UCLA is fantastic.” (14)

Perhaps so, but one of their linguistics programs appears to have been recently hampered by limited resources to the point of discontinuation. UCLA reports that “due to a number of convergent circumstances, the . . . Department of Applied Linguistics was disestablished in 2014.”

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Linguistics is such a fascinating subject. I should have paid more attention to it in college.

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It can be a rather marketable major, too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech-language_pathology
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect_coach
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forensic_linguistics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_linguistics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructed_language
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictional_language

http://clabu.bu.edu/careers.html

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As I recall Keilexandra, a prolific poster about NMF scholarships, was going to go into linguistics. http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/646954-lacs-with-linguistics.html You might be able to find more searching on her username.

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@International95: Don’t you attend Reed College? From what you have seen of your own school, couldn’t you comfortably recommend Reed for its linguistics/anthro curricula?