Linguistics

The Linguistics Program:

Program website: https://slavic.columbia.edu/content/linguistics

Director of Undergraduate Studies: Meredith Landman (meredith.landman@columbia.edu)
Undergraduate Administrator: John Lacqua (jl808@columbia.edu)
 

The Study of Linguistics

In any discussion of linguistics, in popular or academic contexts, the first question is always, what is linguistics, after all?  This is remarkable. Language informs most of our mental and cultural activity, and linguistics is just the study of language.

The significance of linguistics in the context of the liberal arts education is twofold. On the one hand, linguistics is a highly developed field of knowledge whose achievements, challenges, and problems constitute an integral part of the modern world of ideas. On the other, understanding the inner properties of language as a complex mechanism and awareness of the extensive tools of its description developed by linguistics provides a crucial background for a variety of disciplines whose subject involves language, such as analytical philosophy, anthropology, folklore, sociology, psychology, computer science, archeology, classic philology, and literary theory.
Our programs of study are designed to acquaint students with the theoretical ideas, conceptual apparatus, and research techniques involved in the study of language in all its variety and uses.

Student Advising

Consulting Advisers

Students with questions regarding the Linguistics Program should contact the Linguistics DUS, Meredith Landman (meredith.landman@columbia.edu).

Prospective majors or minors should contact the Linguistics DUS as early as possible for advice on progressing through our programs of study.

Students are encouraged to join the Linguistics undergraduate listserv, on which we advertise open houses, colloquia, and other events hosted by our program, as well as internship, summer school, and job opportunities. To join our listserv, please email Meredith Landman (meredith.landman@columbia.edu).

Enrolling in Classes

Students who are waitlisted for a course should email the course instructor.

Preparing for Graduate Study

Columbia’s linguists have distinguished themselves with awards and plans after graduation, such as Fulbright Fellowships in Germany, Georgia, and Taiwan, graduate study at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and CUNY Graduate Center. Linguistics is also a natural background for studying law, and our students have entered such law schools as Harvard, UCLA, and NYU.

Students interested in pursuing a graduate program in linguistics should consult the Linguistics DUS for advice.

Coursework Taken Outside of Columbia

Transfer Courses

Students may be awarded at most three transfer or study abroad courses toward the major and at most one toward the minor, on a case-by-case basis, with approval from the Linguistics DUS. A syllabus for the courses in question will be required for approval.

Study Abroad Courses

Undergraduates have engaged in unique travel and research projects, including sign language in Nicaragua; language attitudes in Kyrgyzstan; colloquial Arabic in Cairo; summer internship at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology; and study abroad in Spain, England, India, Hungary, and Ireland.

Students may be awarded at most three transfer or study abroad courses toward the major and at most one toward the minor, on a case-by-case basis, with approval from the Linguistics DUS. A syllabus for the courses in question will be required for approval.

Core Curriculum Connections

The Linguistics Program offers the Global Core course LING 3102: Endangered Languages in the Global City each fall.
 

Undergraduate Research and Senior Thesis

Senior Thesis Coursework and Requirements

A senior thesis is required for the linguistics major. Linguistics majors must complete two semesters of the senior thesis seminar in the fall and spring of their senior year.

Department Honors and Prizes

Department Honors

Department honors are awarded to at most 10 percent of the graduating cohort. Students must be in good standing (a GPA of at least 3.6) to be considered for department honors.

Affiliated Faculty

• May Ahmar (Arabic; MESAAS)
• Akeel Bilgrami (Philosophy)
  Guadalupe Ruiz Fajardo (Latin American and Iberian Cultures)
  Aaron Fox (Music)
• Melissa Fusco (Philosophy)
• Haim Gaifman (Philosophy)
• Boris Gasparov (Slavic Languages)
• E. Mara Green, (Anthropolgy, Barnard)
• Julia Hirschberg (Computer Science)
• Ana Paula Huback (Latin American and Iberian Studies)
• Meredith Landman (Slavic Languages)
• Karen Lewis (Philosophy, Barnard)
• Lening Liu (Chinese; East Asian Languages and Cultures)
• Reyes Llopis-Garcia (Latin American and Iberian Cultures)
• David Lurie (Japanese; East Asian Languages and Cultures)
• Kathleen McKeown (Computer Science)
• John McWhorter (American Studies)
• Yuan-Yuan Meng (Chinese; East Asian Languages and Cultures)
• Michele Miozzo (Psychology)
• Fumiko Nazikian (Japanese; East Asian Languages and Cultures)
• Youssef Nouhi (Arabic; MESAAS)
• Christopher Peacocke (Philosophy)
• John Phan (East Asian Languages and Cultures)
• Robert Remez (Psychology, Barnard)
• Francisco Rosales-Varo (Latin American and Iberian Studies)
• Carol Rounds (Hungarian; Italian)
• José Plácido Ruiz-Campillo (Latin American and Iberian Studies)
• Richard Sacks (English and Comparative Literature)
• Ann Senghas (Psychology, Barnard)
• Mariame Sy (Wolof; Pulaar; MESAAS)
• Herbert Terrace (Psychology)
• Alan Timberlake (Slavic Languages)
• Zhirong Wang (Chinese; East Asian Languages and Cultures)

Guidance for Undergraduate Students in the Department

Program Planning for all Students

Students with questions regarding the Linguistics Program should contact the Linguistics DUS, Meredith Landman (meredith.landman@columbia.edu).

Prospective majors or minors should contact the Linguistics DUS as early as possible for advice on progressing through our programs of study.

Students are encouraged to join the Linguistics undergraduate listserv, on which we advertise open houses, colloquia, and other events hosted by our program, as well as internship, summer school, and job opportunities. To join our listserv, please email Meredith Landman (meredith.landman@columbia.edu).

Guidance for First-Year Students

First-year students should enroll in LING 3101: Introduction to Linguistics in the fall of their first year and contact the Linguistics DUS for further advice on progressing through our programs of study.

Guidance for Transfer Students

Transfer students should contact the Linguistics DUS as early as possible for advice on progressing through our programs of study.

Undergraduate Programs of Study

Major in Linguistics

Linguistics, especially since the 1960s, has become a highly multifarious and interdisciplinary field of inquiry. This requires that a major acquaint students with a number of subfields, all of which are crucial to understanding what modern linguistic analysis is about (and foster interdisciplinary inquiry as well). To wit, the person with a basic foundation in what constitutes linguistic study in our times, including training for graduate study if desired, understands:

a)         the basics of grammatical analysis in terms of sounds and sentence structure

b)         how languages change over time

c)         the mechanics of how languages express meaning and implication

d)         the details and nuances of how language is used in social space

e)         the ways and extent to which the world's 7000 languages differ from one another

f)         the relationship between language and cognition writ large

To this end, the major requirements – totaling 38 points – are as follows:

1. LING UN3101 INTRODUCTION TO LINGUISTICS (3pts.)

2. LING GU4376 PHONETICS ＆ PHONOLOGY (3pts.)

3. LING GU4903 SYNTAX (3pts.)

4. One course from four out of five themes (12 pts. total):

a) Language in time
Content: Historical linguistics, as in how grammars transform over time (such as the development of Modern from Old English) in terms of sounds, structures, and meaning

LING GU4108 LANGUAGE HISTORY 
ENGL GU4901 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
CHNS GU4019 HISTORY OF CHINESE LANGUAGE

b) Language in context
Content: How language varies in structure and usage according to sociological factors such as gender, class, race, power and culture

LING GU4800 LANGUAGE ＆ SOCIETY
LING UN3102 Endangered Languages in the Global City: Lang, Culture, and Migration in Contempary NYC
ANTH UN1009 INTRO TO LANGUAGE ＆ CULTURE
ANTH GR6067 Language and Its Limits (graduate seminar open to undergraduates)
AMST UN3931 Topics in American Studies (Languages of America)
AMST UN3931 Topics in American Studies (Language Contact)
SPAN GU4010 LANGUAGE CROSSING IN LATINX CARIBBEAN CULTURAL PRODUCTION
SPAN BC3382 SOCIOLING ASPECTS U.S.SPANISH (taught in Spanish)
PORT GU4033 Language ＆ Queer Brazil (ENG)

c) Language diversity
Content: How languages differ from one another and in which ways; especially valuable in this module are a) Field Methods, eliciting the vocabulary and structure of a lesser documented language by questioning a native speaker, in the fashion of professional linguists, b) courses focusing on the structure of individual languages

LING GU4120 LANG DOCUMENTATION/FIELD MTHDS
LING GU4171 LANGUAGES OF AFRICA
HNGR UN3343 Descriptive Grammar Hungarian

d) Language and meaning
Content: semantics, philosophy of language, cognitive linguistics, natural language processing

LING GU4190 DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
PHIL UN2685 INTRO TO PHIL OF LANGUAGE
SPAN GU4011 CONVERSATION IN SPANISH:PRACTICE AND ANA
SPAN GR5450 A COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS ACCOUNT OF LANGUAGE
SPAN GU4030 Spanish Pragmatics (taught in Spanish

e) Psychology and biology of language
Content: psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, language genesis. This is especially important given the burgeoning research on the actual structural representation of language in the brain, as well as increasingly influential proposals that ground language in larger thought processes (as opposed to the Chomskyan proposal that language is, to a considerable extent, generated via exclusive cognitive mechanisms).

LING UN3103 Language, Brain and Mind
PSYC BC3164 PERCEPTION AND LANGUAGE
PSYC GU4232 Production and Perception of Language
PSYC BC3369 Language Development
PSYC GU4242 Evolution of Language (seminar) (graduate seminar open to undergraduates)
PSYC GU4244 LANGUAGE AND MIND
PSYC GU4272 Advanced Seminar in Language Development
PSYC GU4470 PSYCH ＆ NEUROPSYCH OF LANGUAGE

5. One elective course (3 pts.) from a) one of the themes above or b) a linguistics-related course from another department subject to approval from the program. This allows students to either sample more widely or specialize somewhat in a subarea of linguistics that has come to interest them. Pre-approved (non-theme) elective courses for the major are as follows:

Anthropology

ANTH UN3947: Text, Magic, Performance

Cognitive Science

COGSCI UN1001: Introduction to Cognitive Science

Computer Science

COMS W1002: Computing in Context: Computing in Linguistics

COMS W4705: Natural Language Processing

COMS W4995: Topics in Computer Science (with approval)

COMS E6998: Topics in Computer Science (with approval)

East Asian Languages and Cultures

CPLS GU4111: World Philology

EAAS GU4412: History of Writing in a Cosmopolitan East Asia

Philosophy

PHIL UN3411: Symbolic Logic

6. Senior thesis (two semesters, 3 pts. per semester)

7. Language requirement: Two semesters of an intermediate-level language sequence (8 points). The language must differ from that used to fulfill the core foreign language requirement. The language taken can be ancient (e.g., Latin, Sanskrit, or Ancient Greek) or modern but should neither be the student’s native or semi-native language nor belong to one of the major groups of modern European languages (i.e., neither Romance nor Germanic—thus, not French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Catalan, German, or Dutch). Students must actually take the courses in question; testing out of the linguistics language requirement is not allowed.

Minor in Linguistics

The linguistics minor is designed to acquaint students with a scientific approach to language in all of its variety and uses. The minor draws students from diverse disciplines and career paths who share a common interest in language. Linguistic training can be particularly valuable for students majoring in language-related fields such as those in the cognitive sciences (computer science, philosophy, anthropology, psychology, neuroscience, music), language studies, and human rights. A background in linguistics can also be an asset for students pursuing careers in law, language technologies, education, publishing, or speech and hearing sciences. Many of our students are drawn to the field because they are speakers—or advocates for speakers—of smaller or endangered languages, and they want to learn how to document and describe such languages or help develop and advance technologies for them.

Our program offers students the flexibility to tailor the minor to their specific needs and interests. Students may choose courses that will enhance their primary area of study, or they may explore linguistics as a secondary field of study independent of their major.

The minor in linguistics consists of five courses (16 points):

1) Three courses in linguistics (i.e., offered in the Linguistics Program). The choice of courses will depend on the student’s interests. We strongly recommend—but do not require—that students begin the minor with Ling UN3101: Introduction to Linguistics.

Our current course offerings are as follows, organized by subarea:

a) Language structure: The basics of linguistic analysis

LING UN3101: Introduction to Linguistics

LING GU4376: Phonetics & Phonology

LING GU4903: Syntax

LING GU4XXX: Semantics & Pragmatics (new course to be offered in Spring 2025)

b) Language and society: How language is used in social space

AMST UN3990: Topics in American Studies: Language Contact OR Languages of America

LING UN3102: Endangered Languages in NYC

LING GU4800: Language & Society

c) Language and cognition: the role of language in cognition

LING UN3103: Language, Brain & Mind

d) Language diversity: the ways and extent to which the world’s 7000 languages vary

HNGR UN3343: Hungarian Descriptive Grammar

LING GU4120: Language Documentation & Field Methods

LING GU4171: Languages of Africa

LING GU4174: Languages of Asia

LING GU4022: Word & Grammar

e) Language change: how languages change over time

ENGL GU4901: History of the English Language

LING GU4108: Language History

2) One elective course, either a) in linguistics from the list above or b) in a related field, chosen with approval from the Director of Undergraduate Studies. Pre-approved elective courses for the minor are as follows:

Anthropology

ANTH UN1009: Introduction to Language and Culture

ANTH UN3947: Text, Magic, Performance

ANTH GR6067: Language and Its Limits (graduate seminar open to undergraduates)

Cognitive Science

COGSCI UN1001: Introduction to Cognitive Science

Computer Science

COMS W1002: Computing in Context: Computing in Linguistics

COMS W4705: Natural Language Processing

COMS W4995: Topics in Computer Science (with approval)

COMS E6998: Topics in Computer Science (with approval)

East Asian Languages and Cultures

CHNS GU4019: History of Chinese Language
CPLS GU4111: World Philology

EAAS GU4412: History of Writing in a Cosmopolitan East Asia

Latin American and Iberian Cultures

SPAN BC3382: Sociolinguistic Aspects of US Spanish

SPAN GU4010: Language Crossing in Latinx Caribbean Cultural Production

SPAN GU4030: Spanish Pragmatics (taught in Spanish)

SPAN GF5450: Mind and Body in Space: A Cognitive Linguistics Account of Language

Philosophy

PHIL UN2685: Introduction to the Philosophy of Language

PHIL UN3685: Philosophy of Language

PHIL UN3411: Symbolic Logic

PHIL GR9525: Topics in the Philosophy of Language (graduate seminar open to undergraduates)

Psychology

PSYC BC3164: Perception & Language

PSYC BC3369: Language Development

PSYC UN3450: Evolution of Intelligence, Animal Communication & Language

PSYC GU4232: Production & Perception of Language

PSYC GU4244: Language & Mind

PSYC GU4272: Advanced Seminar in Language Development

PSYC GU4470: Psychology and Neuropsychology of Language

3) One language course at the intermediate level (i.e., equivalent to the third semester or beyond) (4 points). The language may be the same as that used to fulfill the core foreign language requirement. The language taken can be ancient (e.g., Latin, Sanskrit, or Ancient Greek) or modern but should neither be the student’s native or semi-native language nor belong to one of the major groups of modern European languages (i.e., neither Romance nor Germanic—thus, not French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Catalan, German, or Dutch). Students must actually take the course in question; testing out of the linguistics language requirement is not allowed.

For students who entered Columbia in or before Fall 2023

Special Concentration in Linguistics

The special concentration in linguistics is not sufficient for graduation in and of itself. It must be taken in conjunction with a major or a full concentration in another discipline.

Please note: the requirements for the special concentration in Linguistics were modified in the Fall 2019 semester. Students who entered Columbia before the Fall 2019 semester have the option of following the new or the old requirements. If you have any questions, please contact the Director of Undergraduate Studies. 

For the new requirements, students must take 23 points in the linguistics program as specified below.

For the old requirements, students must take 18 points; the requirements are specified below, with the exception that the language requirement is one language course at the intermediate level (4pts.), separate from the core curriculum foreign language requirement.

The requirements for the special concentration (23 points) are as follows:

1. Three core courses in linguistics chosen from:

LING UN3101 INTRODUCTION TO LINGUISTICS
LING UN3102
LING UN3103 Language, Brain and Mind
HNGR UN3343 Descriptive Grammar Hungarian
LING GU4108 LANGUAGE HISTORY
LING GU4120 LANG DOCUMENTATION/FIELD MTHDS
LING GU4171 LANGUAGES OF AFRICA
LING GU4190 DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
LING GU4376 PHONETICS ＆ PHONOLOGY
LING GU4800 LANGUAGE ＆ SOCIETY
LING GU4903 SYNTAX

2. Two additional courses from either a) the core linguistics courses, or b) a linguistics-related course from another department subject to approval from the program. Courses previously approved include those listed below:

Anthropology:
ANTH UN1009 INTRO TO LANGUAGE ＆ CULTURE
ANTH GU4042 Agent, Person, Subject, Self
ANTH GR6067 Language and Its Limits
ANTH GR6125 Language, Culture, and Power

Chinese:
CHNS GU4019 HISTORY OF CHINESE LANGUAGE

Computer Science:
COMS W1012 Computational Linguistics
COMS W4705 Natural Language Processing
COMS W4995 Topics in Computer Science (with approval)
COMS E6998 Topics in Computer Science (with approval)

Comparative Literature & Society:
CPLS GU4111 World Philology

French:
FREN BC3011 History of the French Language

Philosophy:
PHIL UN2685 INTRO TO PHIL OF LANGUAGE
PHIL UN3411 SYMBOLIC LOGIC
PHIL UN3685 PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE
PHIL GU4490 LANGUAGE AND MIND

Psychology:
PSYC UN2215 Cognition and the Brain
PSYC UN2440: Language and the Brain
PSYC UN2450 BEHAVIORAL NEUROSCIENCE
PSYC BC3164 PERCEPTION AND LANGUAGE
PSYC UN3265 Auditory Perception (Seminar)
PSYC BC3369 LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT
PSYC GU4232 Production and Perception of Language
PSYC GU4272 Advanced Seminar in Language Development

Spanish:
SPAN BC3382 SOCIOLING ASPECTS U.S.SPANISH
SPAN GU4010 LANGUAGE CROSSING IN LATINX CARIBBEAN CULTURAL PRODUCTION
SPAN GU4011 CONVERSATION IN SPANISH:PRACTICE AND ANA
SPAN GU4030 Spanish Pragmatics
SPAN GR5450 A COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS ACCOUNT OF LANGUAGE

Sociology:
SOCI GU4030 Sociology of Language

3. Language requirement: Two semesters of an intermediate-level language sequence (8 points). The language taken can be an ancient language (e.g., Latin, Ancient Greek, Sanskrit) or a modern one but should neither belong to one of the major groups of modern European languages (Germanic, Romance) nor be the student’s native or semi-native language. In addition, the language cannot also be used to satisfy the core language requirement.

 

Linguistics