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

What is Linguistics?

This is perhaps the question which I hear most frequently upon telling people that I'm getting a degree in linguistics. Of course some people have ideas already, that it's the study of foreign languages, or that it has a lot to do with English grammar or whatever else. While there is often certain truth in what people assume about linguistics, it isn't usually the entire picture.

Simply put, linguistics is the scientific study of language. Granted, while that might be a neat, concise sounding description of linguistics, I also understand that it leaves one with a lot of questions still. What is it that's being studied scientifically about the languages, is it a scientific way to learn other languages or something else entirely? These are certainly great questions and deserve some sort of answer.

Linguistics is a very broad field focusing on all areas of language. This means that the scientific study involved in it is rather all encompassing at times. Some linguist study how languages are put together and how they differ from each other, while others might be studying how language is acquired, both of these things might indeed be very helpful in learning foreign languages, but that isn't really what linguistics is about. Besides this a linguist may also study the sounds in languages and how they affect meaning, the historical changes seen in languages, the construction of individual words and sentences, and what is actually meant as opposed to what might be said. This is still a very vast description of the field. There are a lot more specific areas which I would like to cover in time, but I hope this helps a bit in narrowing down what a linguist does.

Another thing I'd like to convey is while linguist are certainly fascinated by languages in general, and most have studied numerous languages beyond their native tongue, linguistics is not really about learning to speak or read other languages. It's about understanding, on a scientific level, what makes them different, and similar and so the many other factors involved. It's about understanding at its base, the fundamental element that we know of as human communication.

-Lynx

Hwæt!

Hello all,

By means of introduction my name is Lynn and I am a college student currently majoring in English with Linguistics emphasis. One of the things I have discovered with this is that I get a lot of people who ask me what linguistics is, or what I intended to do with a degree in it. While I am not overly opposed to answering these questions, it is beginning to grow a little tiresome. So in order to share what I love with the world, and avoid making any overly sarcastic comments the next time I am asked a question about linguistics, I have decided to start this blog in hopes of answering everyone's questions in the same time and place.

I'd like to start out by covering the broad strokes. What linguistics is, what one can do with a degree in it, what varying branches of the field are, and of course the favorite question, what languages I speak or have studied. I will certainly go in to more depth later on, and will gladly answer questions directed towards the email or twitter account provided on the contact page. I hope that this clears things up for some people, and that we all learn a little and have some fun! Thanks for reading and allowing me to share my passion with you.

-Lynx

Hwæt is an Old English (OE) word meaning more or less listen up, or hark.