About Us

Linguistics is the study of language as a fundamental human activity. Linguists consider language as a cultural, social, and psychological phenomenon and seek to determine what is universal to all languages and what is specific to individual languages, how language varies across individuals and communities, how it is acquired, how it changes, and how it is processed by humans and machines.  Linguistics is an inherently interdisciplinary field that links the humanities, the social sciences, and the other cognitive sciences, as well as computer science, education, and hearing and speech sciences.

The department offers courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Some focus on analyzing structural patterns of sounds (phonetics and phonology), meanings (semantics and pragmatics), words (morphology), sentences (syntax). Others examine how these structures vary over time (historical linguistics), or over individuals and social groups (sociolinguistics), or how language is processed and learned by humans (psycholinguistics and language acquisition) or by computers (computational linguistics).

A variety of open forums provide for the discussion of linguistic issues, including colloquia and regularly scheduled workshops in computational linguistics, phonetics and phonology, psycholinguistics, semantics and pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and syntax and morphology.

The department offers an M.A., Ph.D., and Ph.D. minor in Linguistics. For admissions information, please see the Department of Linguistics admissions page. The GRE is not required.

Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Cognitive Science

Philosophy, Psychology and Linguistics participate in an interdisciplinary designation in Cognitive Science for doctoral students.  The designation is open to any Ph.D. candidate in the participating departments, and is intended to provide an interdisciplinary education as well as a deeper concentration in one of the constituent disciplines through basic coursework.  Students who complete the requirements within their department and the Cognitive Science requirements will have their Ph.D.s granted from the parent department with a special designation in Cognitive Science.

People

Browse the people that work for Stanford's Department of Linguistics.

• Faculty

• Staff

Connect with Us

Use these channels to learn more about our department and reach out to us.

• Visit our website: http://linguistics.stanford.edu

• Email us: linguistics@lists.stanford.edu

• Call our main office: (650) 723-4284

• Fax our main office: (650) 723-5666

Find Us on Campus or Send Us Mail

Department of Linquistics
Margaret Jacks Hall
Building 460 Rm. 127
Mail Code: 2150
Stanford, CA 94305