<p>Some posters may be confusing linguistics with language study. Linguistics is the scientific study of language. Linguists study phonetics/phonemics (the sound systems of languages), morphology (word-formation), syntax (phrase and sentence structures), semantics (meaning), and other aspects of language (including language change over time or the use of computational models to process language in machine translation or speech-to-text systems).</p>
<p>Universities with strong linguistics programs include (in approximate order of selectivity):</p>
<p>MIT, Stanford
Penn, Brown, Chicago
Cornell, Georgetown, Northwestern
Berkeley
USC
UCLA
UT-Austin</p>
<p>This is not meant to be an exhaustive list. </p>
<p>LACs with relatively strong linguistics programs include Pomona, Swarthmore, Carleton, and Reed. I ordinarily tend to prefer LACs to research universities, but this is one field that most LACs cannot easily support due to its interdisciplinary nature and low demand.</p>