So the daughter has of late become interested in linguistics…she’s very much into language and grammar, and loves studying foreign languages as well. Now, she’s at the age where she changes her mind about what she’s interested in every couple of weeks, so we’re not taking this too seriously. But just out of curiosity, what sorts of things does one do with a degree in linguistics?
Tell her to get some computer science in also and she’ll be in great demand.
really? why is that?
Language translation and natural language interpretation. There’s a lot of work going on in these areas. There are plenty of resources for the engineering, not so much for the linguistics. Here’s a company I’ve had some exposure to.
My employment in this area was ephemeral, but I know of folks working for places like Nuance Communications and Humedica, working on natural language processing and voice recognition. In all cases there’s a lot of computer stuff involved.
Linguistics is a broad field. There are lots of research areas that are mostly confined to academia, but as you see, there are commercial applications as well. The wikipedia article is a good starting summary. If you all haven’t already, it might be good to give that a look-over and let us know if anything strikes her eye or looks confusing.
State Department, Department of Defense, Tourism, International corporations; should be a few million jobs related to linguistics in there.
Recall that linguistics is not about learning languages.
Well, except for when it is. But you can be a monolingual linguist.
I know two guys with degrees in linguistics - they both work as copy editors.
If you’re good with languages, you’d be better served, I believe, to apply that to other, more lucrative fields.
I went to college with a girl that was a language wizard and spoke six languages - she majored in International Banking and now makes very serious money.
I suppose you can but I know a number of linguists and none of them is monolingual. Chomsky’s master’s thesis was titled something like, “On the morphophonemics of modern Hebrew”, although he has spent his entire career studying the formal grammar of English in minute detail. But his students, one of whom I used to know quite well, applied his methods to her native language (Quebec French). And that is fairly typical of the Chomskian school.
There is another school that takes a language, maybe a dying language, and tries to record as much of it as possible. As it happened I chaired a PhD final exam a month ago of a student who had studied in detail the northern Quebec language Miq’mak. After the exam was over, I asked him if he was fluent in the language. He said not really fluent, although he could get by. A century there was a lot of this supported by religious organizations who wanted only to produce a bible in the language, but I have the impression that not much of this goes on today.
I second the idea of getting into something like machine translation.
Off hand I can think of one guy who does this. Not sure where his funding comes from. Probably not bible-makers.
There are also organizations that try to help communities record and preserve their own languages, e.g. Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages - Wikipedia
I was trying to fight the “linguists = people who speak lots of languages or who translate stuff” notion, which a few posters might have. It doesn’t help that DOD appears to have adopted this use of the term.
My college roommate received his bachelors degree in Linguistics. He’s never worked in the field; he wound up going into law, and is now a law professor.
He’s one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever known, is incredibly well-read, and versed in a huge range of topics. Linguistics interested him keenly when he was in school, but he never found a career path in it.
And no mention of how cunning it will make you.
Serious question: are you my mummy?*
Anyway, although linguistics isn’t about learning languages per se, knowing how language itself works is very useful for those who want to learn lots of them, and speaking a lot of languages makes one useful in pretty much any career. So the answer is “whatever she wants.” Another route that no one has mentioned is diplomacy and international relations, for which multilingualism is imperative for multiple reasons.
*(Or daddy, but that doesn’t have the same ring to it)
Check post #6 above.
This is probably better suited to IMHO than GQ.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
I have a friend who did her undergrad in linguistics and then grad work is speach therapy, she helps ESL students with speach impediments.
Agree with this in terms of easily being able to secure employment. Speech-language pathology is a well-compensated field with many options for settings (school-based, hospitals, clinics, etc…) - maybe the health care field doesn’t appeal to her right now, but it is super-practical in terms of paying down those bigfat student loans.
There’s an older meaning of the term which I tend to imagine was used in the days of rich globe-trotting adventurers. Those who spoke and understood several languages (five is often a benchmark, for some reason) were called (among other things) Linguists. I think it’s easy enough to imagine some people who spoke several languages getting nerdy and starting to rigorously analyze one language (or compare/contrast two or more languages) and slowly founding a field of linguistics.*
A linguist in the modern sense is someone who understands how (a) language or facet thereof works. We spent a little while analyzing Yoda’s speech patterns one one of these boards and a seriously detailed study of that kind would be something a linguist does.
More to the question:
A person who speaks several languages can find jobs in international and intercultural fields, particularly in international businesses (and those that wish to expand their markets or resources) and dipomatic and legal positions. My brother works for a company that does a ton of work in translating legal and technical documents between Japanese and English, and they occassionally also do Japanese-to-German and Japanese-to-Spanish translations, as well.
I made a point of adding an English as a Second Language (ESL) Instructor’s certificate program to my college studies, specifically because I wanted to go to Japan and get paid to teach English. From my pool of 25 applicants, I was the only one offered a position and it was because I already knew the grammatical rules of English as well as several teaching methods.# [It might have helped that I spoke English and had studied Japanese, Russian, and Spanish, as well but I wouldn’t place much emphasis on those studies.] I wouldn’t suggest it as a career, but it was a great way to get to Japan on someone else’s budget right out of college. And I know several of my colleagues spent several years teaching there and one had plans to just travel around the world teaching ESL for different companies.
Linguists of the modern sort who have PHD’s in Linguistics are found in ivory towers, mico-analyzing languages or facets thereof. 
Seriously, though, people with training in linguistics are expected to have learned to break down and super-analyze elements – of (a) language, specifically, but the skill transfers to analysis of other things like processes, messages, et cetera, as well. Such people are highly valued in business analytics and legal analysis fields.
–G!
*Linguistics, as a study, is often considered a subspecialty or off-shoot of the Sociological focus of Symbolic Interaction, which analyzes words, gestures, behaviors, et cetera in their social contexts.
#Several of my students in Japan absolutely loved Chomsky’s Transformations methods. My fellow Linguistics students hated the methods, but my Japanese students liked it because it was like converting sentences using an algabraic method or modern rebus construction. Since they were accustomed to pictogrammatics (Chinese writing and their borrowings that became Kanji), it was easy for them to grasp.