Linguistics York University

Overview

In the field of Linguistics, we attempt to answer the following types of questions:

• What is the relation between language and society?
• Why and how does language change through time?
• What is the relation between language and thought?
• How do languages differ from one another?
• How are all languages alike?
• How do children learn language?
• How do we understand and produce sentences?

Linguistics has applications to teaching, speech-language pathology and the applied sciences of communication engineering and computer science.

York's focus is on sociolinguistics and as a result, the program can provide you with a social and cultural perspective on almost every aspect of the humanities and social sciences.

• Take advantage of our smaller class sizes and get to know your professors.
• Focus both on core aspects of linguistics (phonology, syntax, morphology, and semantics), as well as sociolinguistics, linguistic variation and change, discourse analysis, psycholinguistics, and language acquisition.
• The Department offers more than 20 different courses a year which investigate the relation between language and society and between language and thought.

Possible Career Paths upon graduating the Linguistics BA program at York University

• Publishing
• Lexicography (dictionary-making)
• Evaluating and developing teaching materials
• Translation and interpretation
• Language documentation and fieldwork
• Government planning and administering language policy
• Developing literacy programs for adults
• Teaching English as a second language

In addition, a degree in linguistics provides excellent pre-professional training for such fields as speech-language pathology, education, law and graduate study in linguistics.