Undergraduate

Most students discover Linguistics serendipitously, after encountering the topic in a book, a recommendation from friends, social media, or realizing how much they love learning languages or thinking about how and why we communciate like we do. If you think you might be interested in Linguistics, or want to learn more, a great first step is to consider taking an introductory course such as LING 10, LING 83, or LING 101 (one will be offered each semester, and while they differ in emphases they cover enough similar material that there is no need to take more than one). 

After taking an introductory course, students will have a more accurate idea of the way they'd be interested in incorporating Linguistics into their undergraduate experience. There are many ways to do this, and in particular, the courses offered by the Department of Linguistics place emphasis on linguistic theory, historical linguistics, and the cognitive aspects related to language, as we sketch briefly below and detail in the different "tracks" and their requirements for the concentration and secondary. 

For information generally about the undergraduate program in linguistics, please don't hesitate to reach out to  our Director of Undergraduate Studies or Assistant Head Tutor. Our concentration is big enough to provide lively learning experiences and small enough for personal attention and curriculum customization, and we all share a love for learning all things language related! Best of all: a Linguistics concentration keeps every door open: our graduates go onto careers in STEM (medical school, tech jobs, etc.), education (PhD programs and K-12 education are both common matriculations for our alums), business (many of our graduates work in consulting, marketing, etc.), law (nothing prepares you better for the LSAT, or law school, than linguistics!), and nearly every other field - the possibilities are wide open, and linguistics graduates bring with them a breadth of methodological approaches and a depth of widely applicable domain knowledge.

Linguistic Theory track

One of the most remarkable features of human beings is that all children learn whatever language(s) they are exposed to in the first years of their life, whether or not they receive any explicit teaching, to a level rarely mastered by those who attempt to learn the same languages later in life. Linguistic theory seeks to characterize this knowledge of the human mind explicitly and to account for the ease and speed with which humans acquire it. Since the bulk of the knowledge that enables us to use language is unconscious, most people are unaware of its almost unbelievable complexity and richness. Nor is it obvious to the casual observer that the underlying structures of languages as superficially different as English, Zulu, Navajo, and American Sign Language are profoundly and fundamentally the same. The traditional branches of linguistic theory are syntax, the study of sentence structure; phonology, the study of the sounds and sound systems; morphology, the study of word structure; and semantics, the study of meaning. Courses in Linguistic Theory focus on understanding the similarities and variation in these structures across the world's (spoken and signed) languages through analysis of linguistic data.

Historical Linguistics track

All languages change over time, sometimes giving rise to one or more daughter languages and, eventually, to families of related languages. Depending on their specific interests, historical linguists may investigate the processes and principles by which language change occurs, or may study the documented history of individual languages, or try to recover the prehistory of language families by using the “comparative method” to reconstruct the unattested common parent of a set of attested daughter languages. A much-studied example of a reconstructed language is “Proto-Indo-European,” the parent language of the family that includes most of the ancient and modern languages of Europe (including English) and northern India.

Mind/Brain/Behavior track 

Since language is a distinctively human characteristic, the study of language provides an important take-off point for investigating the complexities of the human mind/brain. Linguistics spearheaded the “cognitive revolution” in the 1950s and has occupied a privileged position in debates on cognitive issues ever since. At Harvard, the Mind/Brain/Behavior (MBB) Interfaculty Initiative was founded to help faculty in distinct research areas collaborate on projects making use of emerging techniques in neuroscience. One such technique, brain imaging, has long been of interest to linguists; newer experimental work is establishing connections between linguistic theory and language processing, language acquisition, language use, spatial and social cognition, evolutionary psychology and biology, and neuroscience.