<p>What can you do with a Linguistics major?
or a Linguistics and Computer science Major?</p>
<p>Linguistics major - pretty much nothing. Can you imagine a job where you would need to know linguistics? Computer science will let you do tons of stuff, taking both together might be fun. Just don't expect a linguistics major to open up doors for you that another humanities major won't.</p>
<p>I read that the FBI and other government agenies hire linguists</p>
<p>Computational linguistics is probably the hottest field in linguistics at the moment. It's quite useful and is very employable. You can work for companies to do stuff with machine translation and speech synthesis. I believe that Euler321 is incorrect in his statement that a linguistics major won't open up any doors compared to another humanities major. Linguistics majors are usually sought after in companies like Rosetta Stone and other language acquisition companies. I don't see how a Joe-English major would be equally qualified to a Linguistics major. Linguistics really straddles the gap between the humanities and the sciences.</p>
<p>so compsci + linguistics = computational linguistics? interesting interesting. so the possible careersi nclude .. being a computer scientist or what? or would you work as a programmer? i'm kinda confuzed on the two.. haha when i think of computer scientist i'm thinking Artificial intelligence, is that right?</p>
<p>Computational linguists, in the most basic sense, work on helping computer comprehend natural languages.</p>
<p>Computational linguistics is a good field, but you will probably need a PhD. Straight out of college, I think computer science and linguistics can be a good combo.</p>
<p>Wow, I totally forgot about computational linguistics. Sorry, my first response was wrong. A combination of those things could be pretty valuable.</p>
<p>As others have said, computational linguistics is a very hot field with a lot of job opportunities. Linguistics/comp-sci isn't that uncommon of a combo in my experience, since formal linguistics and computer science appeal to a lot of the same skills and ways of thinking. However, another thing they have in common is that a lot of people plan on majoring in them without knowing what they're really about, so do your research and experiment before ending up on a path that doesn't work for you :)</p>
<p>Let's see... off hand, I know four people who did that double major. One is working at the DOD doing more comp-sci-ish stuff (with an eye to doing computational ling once she's out of there), since she owes the DOD a couple of years of work for paying for her comp-sci masters. Another has a private sector job working in machine translation. The third is using her programming skills to work in marine sciences, and the fourth is happily working in a bookstore. Quite a variety!</p>