COURSE CURRICULUM

The Bachelor of Arts in Linguistics, offered by the Department of Linguistics and Language Development, focuses on the scientific study of language, including its structure, meaning, history, variation, and cognitive foundations. The program explores how language reflects human thought, supports communication across cultures, and functions in applied domains such as education, law, medicine, and technology. It also emphasizes modern applications of linguistics in areas like artificial intelligence, speech recognition, and natural language processing, while providing access to advanced tools for acoustic and perceptual analysis of speech. Students gain strong analytical, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills that prepare them for graduate study or careers in fields such as linguistics, anthropology, education, communication, law, and speech and hearing sciences. The curriculum requires 120 total units, including core general education, upper-division general education, GWAR/WID writing requirements, and university electives. Major preparation may include prior language study or demonstrated language competence. The major itself consists of 36 units of required coursework covering foundational areas such as phonetics, syntax, phonology, semantics, discourse, morphology, and historical linguistics, along with electives that allow students to specialize in areas like psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics, language teaching, computational linguistics, and speech technology. Students may also pursue certificates in Computational Linguistics or TESOL through elective selections. Overall, the program provides a flexible yet rigorous academic structure that combines theoretical understanding of language with practical and technological applications, equipping students for diverse academic and professional pathways in language-related fields.