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Linguistics - A.B.

About this Degree

Our undergraduate curriculum offers you the opportunity to learn many different ways to analyze human language. You will be exposed to data from many languages in your coursework, and you will be offered many occasions to showcase your knowledge of a variety of languages.

Having only 8 required major courses, many students choose to double major in Linguistics. In fact, due to the interdisciplinary nature of Linguistics, most of our courses will also earn you credit in subjects such as English, Spanish, French, German, Communication Sciences, or Comparative Literature, making Linguistics an easy addition to many degrees.

Majoring in linguistics develops valuable intellectual skills such as analytical reasoning, critical thinking, argumentation, and clarity of expression. This means you will have the ability to make insightful observations, formulate testable hypotheses, generate predictions, make arguments, draw conclusions, and communicate findings to a wider audience.

As a Linguistics major you will also be well-equipped for a variety of graduate-level and professional programs from Linguistics and Communication Sciences to applied fields such as language instruction or interpretation.

What you will learn

You will begin your study with a few introductory courses, establishing the breadth of the field and grounding you in the process of linguistic analysis. You will then customize the remainder of your program to fit your own interests within the areas of formal linguistic theory, second language acquisition, language variation, and historical linguistics. In all, you will take a total of 8 upper-level Linguistics courses to complete the major, and your program of study may look very different than a fellow Linguistics major.

View Curriculum

Graduate Program MA-non-thesis, MA, and PhD

The Department of Linguistics offers a dual A.B./M.A. degree program (part of UGA's DoubleDawgs initiative) that students can complete in 5 years.

Additional information can be found here.

Please provide a general description of your research.

Several undergraduate scholarship and award opportunities are available at the University of Georgia.

Undergraduate Scholarships & Awards

The Linguistics Society at the University of Georgia
Employers:

Many commercial operations are welcoming to linguists, such as advertising, journalism, and especially the computing industry, where linguists can operate in speech recognition and analysis, natural language processing, or artificial intelligence. Governmental organizations like the Foreign Service, the FBI, the NSA, or the CIA, are eager employers of those with skills in languages and linguistics.

Possible Job Titles:

Linguist, Translator, Computer Scientist in Natural Language Processing or Artificial Intelligence, Professor. With a connection to other fields, linguistics sometimes find themselves under the rubric of an Anthropologist or Sociologist, among others.

Degree Details

Support Linguistics at UGA

Your donations to the Department of Linguistics will support research and travel opportunities for students and faculty and other initiatives to enhance students' education in linguistics. Please consider joining other friends and alumni who have shown their support by making a gift to our fund. We greatly appreciate your contributions to the success of our programs!  

EVERY DOLLAR CONTRIBUTED TO THE DEPARTMENT HAS A DIRECT IMPACT ON OUR STUDENTS AND FACULTY.