What Can You Do With A Linguistics Degree?

The other favorite question when I tell people I'm majoring in linguistics, is what one can do with a degree in that, or occasionally, what I want to do with it. The truth is I don't know yet what I want to do with it, I'm only 20, I've just barely declared my major, I figure I'm doing pretty good at that. All I know is I love linguistics and I want to do something with it, what that is I will figure out down the line. However, to ease people's curiosity I can tell you some of the things which I could do with a linguistics degree.

There are several areas or industries that someone who majored in linguistics can go on to work in. Some of them require further education, but since I am not opposed to that, I will include them as well. The major areas are, the computer industry, education, translation, publishing, editing, writing, a testing agency, lexicography (working on dictionaries), a consultant for law or medical fields, advertising, fieldwork studying languages, the government, or Hollywood. There are other areas as well, but that is a pretty broad spectrum right there. Of course within these areas there are all kinds of things that one could do, so I will break that down a bit as well.

Particularly if paired with a computer science degree, but even if not, there is a lot of work to be found in the computer industry for a linguist. Search engine optimization, speech recognition, text-to-speech, artificial intelligence, and online translators are all things that come to mind in these field as needing linguist. Google, for instance in known to hire linguist to help there search engine work better and make appropriate word based connections.

Education may seem like an obvious field for a linguist, but there is a lot one can do within that. A linguist might teach a foreign language, teach English as a Second Language (ESL) in the U.S. or other countries, or teach linguistics at a college level. At the college level they may also be participating in various forms of research, even including the fieldwork of studying and preserving languages around the world.

Translation and the publishing/writing fields are more obvious choices, with jobs in translating books, or other mediums. Plus the general understanding of language that could be helpful for publishing, editing and writing. Not to mention translators are needed in all kinds of places, from the United Nations, to hospitals and courtrooms.

Testing agencies may hire linguist to help them develop appropriately worded standardized exams, and linguistic knowledge is highly useful in the field of lexicography where one works on writing and or editing dictionaries and their like.

Consulting in law and medical fields may include varying aspects. It could relate to properly understanding the meaning of the wording of legal documents and papers. Or if one goes on to get a Masters in applied linguistics, or forensic linguistics, one may assist police or the FBI in identifying who wrote what, what level of intent is indicated in writings, as well as what corporations can have a word based copyright on. Besides this, a linguist is also a good candidate for training as a speech therapist, which can certainly take them into the medical field as well.

Linguistics is very important for advertising purposes, particularly when a corporation wants to advertise something in another country. Not only for making sure of no translation errors (which many large companies have made) but also in order to understand how to word something or advertise something to a different culture.

The U.S. government hire linguist in many of their agencies, including the FBI, CIA, NSA, Foreign Service, DoD, and Department of Education. Linguist may work for the government helping to translate and/or communicate in other languages, or helping assist with refugees coming into the country and many other things.

Finally, a linguist may even find work in Hollywood, or anywhere else they make movies by doing voice coaching for actors. This may just be to improve their intonation or pronunciation, or it could involve teaching them to speak in another language, dialect or accent, so that they sound like an authentic speaker of whatever that is.

While I do not know yet what I want to do with my degree in linguistics, I hope that this provides some helpful insight into what some of my options in the field are. A vast chunk of these areas interest me a lot, and some of them not at all, but at least I think this illustrates just how much there is that can be done with a degree in linguistics.

-Lynx