The Minor in Linguistics provides students with a rich understanding of the structure, use, and cultural significance of language. Combining foundational knowledge with interdisciplinary applications, the program explores how language shapes and reflects human experience. This minor is ideal for students interested in language analysis, teaching, translation, cultural studies, and the intersections of language with society, identity, and cognition.
Understanding Linguistics
Linguistics is the science of language. It helps us understand how language is organized, and how we are able to communicate with each other and encode our thoughts into a linguistic form. It explains how meaning is encoded in words, phrases, sentences, sounds, and letters. Linguistics has many areas of study, including:
- sociolinguistics which tackles communication issues
- psycholinguistics which examines the working of the brain in language acquisition and uses
- discourse analysis that explores our ability to produce cohesive and coherent texts
- computational linguistics that has become essential in the development of computer translations and speech recognition.
School / College
College of Arts & Sciences
Department
World Languages and Literatures
Contact
Dr. Miaowei Weng