Welcome to Linguistics!

UT's Department of Linguistics is committed to teaching and research in linguistics, the scientific and humanistic study of human language. Our research examines form and meaning in a wide variety of the world's languages, including signed and spoken languages. We study language as part of the biological and cognitive endowment of our species. We use computational techniques to probe the structure of human languages. We design experiments to understand how children learn language. And we describe and document highly-endangered languages, especially indigenous languages of the Americas. For more information about us, follow this link.

Undergraduate Research Opportunities

UT's Department of Linguistics is committed to teaching and research in linguistics, the scientific and humanistic study of human language. Our research examines form and meaning in a wide variety of the world's languages, including ones that are quite endangered. We study language as part of the biological and cognitive endowment of our species. We use computational techniques to probe the structure of human languages.

Students in the Linguistics Department are busy studying what the presence of loan words indicates about the subsistence patterns of Amazonian natives, creating a standardized sentence recognition test for non-native speakers of English, watching popular movies to analyze the sociolinguistic implications of white characters using African American Vernacular English, and determining why your mother sometimes calls you by your sister's name.  You may be surprised to hear that graduate students are not the only ones doing these things.  Many undergraduates are involved in exciting and cutting edge research projects in a wide variety of linguistic fields.  And if you are an undergrad with an interest in linguistics, you could be doing research too. For more information, follow this link.