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Will Linguistics Get Me a Job?
Some things linguists (or people with linguistics training) do*
- Education : Develop curricula & materials, train teachers, design tests and other methods of assessment, especially for language arts and second language learning. Teacher education and educational research.
- Teach at the community-college or university level : A graduate degree in linguistics allows you to teach in departments such as linguistics, philosophy, psychology, speech & communication sciences, anthropology, English, and other languages.
- Teach E nglish as a S econd Language ( ESL ) in the U nited S tates or abroad: To teach ESL in the US, you will probably need additional training in language pedagogy, such as a Masters degree in Education or TESOL. Many teaching positions abroad require only an undergraduate degree, but some specialized training in the subject will make you a much more effective teacher. The UO offers an undergraduate certificate in Second Language Acquisition & Teaching (SLAT): http://slat.uoregon.edu
- Teach a foreign language : Students will benefit from your knowledge of language structure and an ability to make certain aspects of the language especially clear.
- Bilingual education in K- 12.
- Computer industry : Speech recognition, search engines, artificial intelligence.
- Language documentation or fieldwork : Document, analyze, and preserve languages (many of which are endangered). Some organizations engage in language-related fieldwork, including documentation, language surveys, literacy programs, translating documents of cultural heritage.
- Foundation for various professions (that may require further advanced training) : Law, writing, international business, international relations, diplomacy, international development, etc.
- Translation or interpretation : Government, hospitals, courts of law, document translation, literary translation, etc.
- Publishing industry, technical writer, journalist : Editing, publishing, and writing.
- Work for a testing agency : Prepare and evaluate standardized exams, conduct research on assessment issues.
- Work with dictionaries (lexicography) : Knowledge of phonology, morphology, historical linguistics, dialectology, and sociolinguistics is key to becoming a lexicographer.
- Consultant on language in professions such as law or medicine : Forensic linguistics involves studying the language of legal texts, linguistic aspects of evidence, issues of voice identification, etc. Law enforcement agencies law firms, and the courts hire linguists.
- Work for a product-naming company : Product-naming companies do extensive linguistic research on the associations that people make with particular sounds and classes of sounds.
- Work for a government : N ational governments often hire linguists for equivalents of the Foreign Service, the FBI, etc.; translation, interpretation, code-breaking, etc.
- Become an actor or train actors : Training in pronunciation, intonation, and different elements of grammar in order to sound like real speakers of a language or dialect. An actor may even need to know how to make mistakes to sound like an authentic nonnative speaker.
*Some of this material has been adapted from ‘Why Major in Linguistics’, by Monica Macaulay and Kristen Syrett http://www.lsadc.org/info/ling-faqs-whymajor.cfm
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