I was just accepted to Brown as a transfer for sophomore fall. I hope to major in linguistics in the CLPS department. I really love Brown as a school (location, size, focus on undergrads, open curriculum), but I am concerned the linguistics program doesn’t have everything I’m looking for.
My favorite areas of linguistics are phonology, historical linguistics, and sociolinguistics. But the department seems like it has mostly psycholinguistics and language cognition. I’d likely have to take a lot of classes outside the department that count towards the major, like the sociolinguistics ones under anthropology. And according to the linguistics concentration adviser, they won’t have historical linguistics after this year because it’s only taught by a visiting professor!
Can any linguistics majors tell me if I would be disappointed with the department at Brown? What do students who aren’t interested in psycholinguistics and language cognition end up doing?
Thanks!
Did you make a decision about this?
Don’t know about Brown per se, but you should ensure they have what you want before you transfer. It’s already a narrow field and if you decide or need to pursue a Phd then you want to ensure that you are in the right school where you can pursue YOUR interests and not just what is offered. I’m assuming you explored other Universities. What did they offer compared to what Brown offers? In this field I’d go with the best program over the best named school (if that’s even a factor in your decision)
Academic linguist chiming in, in case this is still an issue six weeks later: If you’re interested in graduate study in linguistics, as long as your undergrad provides you with a decent basic understanding of core of the field (particularly the “theoretical” bits—phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, maybe semantics), then it doesn’t really matter what your undergrad focus is. For my part, my undergrad was at Maryland back when it was even more theoretically oriented than it is now (which is, yes, hard to imagine), but in grad school I fell into variationist sociolinguistics, and now I work primarily on issues of language change over the lifespan using sociolinguistic (mostly sociophonetic, actually) tools.
TL;DR: If you’re interested in a graduate degree in linguistics, your undergrad focus isn’t determinative of what you can do.
If you’re interested in studying linguistics just for the sake of studying linguistics, and you aren’t interested in further study in it, then it’s a trickier question—can one be happy when your subfield of interest isn’t covered deeply at your school?
Well, speaking about Brown linguistics specifically, and given the OP’s stated interest in phonology, historical, and sociolx, I’d say that the answer is a definitive probably.
First of all, I wouldn’t worry at all about sociolx courses at Brown being located in anthropology. That’s just where those courses are located, and such divisions often occur due to simple accidents of history. (My first faculty position was at a university with a very strong undergrad lx program, but the sociolx courses—and, since I was hired to teach some of them, me—were, for reasons lost to the mists of history, located in the English department rather than the lx department. These things happen.)
For similar reasons, I wouldn’t worry at all about being required to take courses outside of the department. In fact, as someone who’s worked pretty intensely with issues of undergrad curriculum for better than a decade now, I actually prefer it when departments take that approach.
Eyeballing Brown’s lx major, though, it looks like it has a pretty standard theoretical core (a survey course plus courses in phonology, syntax, and either semantics or pragmatics), and then what they say is one course in psycholx, but it’s actually a pretty wide range of options. Basically, though, it’s a very standard core—even if you were focusing in historical lx, you’d probably have to take those anyway. You then have to develop a five-course “theme” from the list they have, and three from the list cover soiolx, three are historical (though all of them are language-specific, but you’d still necessarily get general principles), and they have a topics course in phonology. So the sociolx options are stronger, but all of your interests are represented.
So yeah, it does seem like you could get what you want. Would you emerge from it a specialist? No—but honestly, if our field to produce baccalaureates in linguistics who were narrow specialists in anything, we’d’ve failed in our job at producing graduates who understand the way language (as opposed to a specific slice of language) works.