Linguistics Rutgers University

Overview

Linguists study language because they find it interesting in its own right. Language is a complex cognitive and social phenomenon. It is a product of the human mind, yet it requires rich social input in order to be learned properly. Understanding one’s own language is effortless but understanding a foreign language that you’ve never heard before is impossible. How is it that the human mind can turn particular strings of sounds into such a rich stream of information? Why are languages around the world so different, but yet upon closer inspection turn out to have so much in common? Why is it easy to learn a language as a baby, but hard to learn it as an adult? These are just some of the questions that linguistics seeks to answer.

It turns out that the study of language, like other fields of empirical research, yields dividends beyond its own domain. Modern work in linguistics has had a profound impact on many fields where language is central: psychology, cognitive science, computer science, philosophy, the study of individual languages, literary theory, and anthropology. Students in the Linguistics programme of Rutgers University can focus closely on language and its empirical phenomena through the study of syntax, semantics, or phonology, and they can also explore the many cross-disciplinary connections between linguistics and other fields.

There are numerous career paths a linguistics major might pursue. Some core areas are:

• Basic research at universities like Rutgers and at research centers such as the Center for Cognitive Science (RUCCS)

• Computer science and industry: Apply computer-related skills to language, write programmes that automatically translate and check grammar, design software, build machines that can understand human and produce speech, or use computational tools to analysis corpus data and/or big data online. 

• Psychology and Neuroscience: Merge Linguistics and Psychology to design psycholinguistic experiments that investigate how we acquire, process, and store language in the brain. 

• Speech Pathology and Audiology: Connect theory to practice by studying typical and atypical language and behavior. Work to prevent, assess, diagnose, and treat speech, language, and communication disorders.

• Foreign language teaching and translation: Deploy knowledge of the structure of language and knowledge of multiple languages to teach languages in schools and other programmes, and/or work as a translator.

• Language in education: Design educational materials for language instruction, study the role of language in different educational, social, and cultural contexts, investigate the role of language in learning and teaching, and incorporate topics and lessons relevant to language into curricula.

• Forensic Linguistics (language and the law): study the language of the written law, language used in judicial processes, and the use of linguistic evidence in court proceedings.

• The skills developed in the study of linguistics (attention to detail, developing hypotheses and testing them, analytic reasoning) serve as good foundation for various fields including law, teaching, publishing, technical writing, library science, editing and others.