For Students
Linguistics Programs at Illinois
The Department of Linguistics offers two undergraduate instruction options: a General Linguistics major and a Languages program. Additionally, the department offers minors in Linguistics, African Languages, and Hindi.
The department also offers graduate programs leading to M.A. and Ph.D. degrees. These allow for specialization in a number of areas, while retaining a strong foundation of required courses.
Certificate programs in both Second-Language Acquisition and Teacher Education (SLATE) and Language and Speech Processing are also offered.
What Linguistics Is
What characterizes human beings most clearly as being different from other animals is their ability to use language as a tool for cooperative (and sometimes not so cooperative) communication of their ideas, for conceiving and handing down complex systems of knowledge, and for changing these systems. In addition, human beings use language to express their feelings, to make each other feel comfortable or uncomfortable, to compose literature and poetry, and to talk about language itself. Language is central to our being human and, as such, is a worthy subject for investigation.
Most people take language in everyday life for granted. This is not surprising since speaking and understanding language happen without our being aware of how much mental or physical activity is involved. To understand even a simple sentence like "The cat is on the mat," we have to hear a sequence of sounds, recognize the sequence of sounds as a sequence of words belonging to a language we know, recognize how the words build successively larger groups, and recognize how the meanings of the constituent parts combine to determine the meaning of each group. Amazingly, children learn how to do this without knowing they are doing so and without serious formal instruction.
Just how does this happen? This is the question central to linguistics.
Some aspects of linguistic structure that are studied by linguists are:
- Phonetics: how we produce and recognize speech sounds?
- Phonology: how we combine these utterances into the sound structure of language
- Syntax: the manner in which we combine words into sentences
- Morphology: word formation and inflections
- Semantics: what words and sentences mean
- Sociolinguistics: how language is used in society and how social factors determine the nature of language use
- Psycholinguistics: the psychological processes underlying language behavior
- Computational Linguistics: the interface between computers, mathematics, and linguistics.
As with other aspects of human life, languages have histories; present-day English differs so much from the Middle English of Chaucer that we might as well (and linguists do) call them different languages. Issues connected with language as an historical phenomenon are addressed under the headings of HISTORICAL or COMPARATIVE LINGUISTICS.
Fascinating in its own right, the study of linguistics can also be extremely useful as preparation for foreign language teaching or for teaching English abroad. Governments hire linguists as interpreters and for intelligence work. Private businesses and corporations use linguists to consult on and create speech recognition and voice production software. A linguistics education also provides a good foundation for study in fields such as Anthropology, Speech and Hearing Science, Psychology, Cognitive Science, Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science, Lexicography, Stylistics, Text and Discourse Analysis. Combined with a good language background, it also is useful for those interested in area studies, such as East Asian and Pacific Studies, African Studies, South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Global Studies, and European Union Studies.