The graduate program in Linguistics at Berkeley combines mentoring from faculty members in the department, coursework, research training, and professional development opportunities.
Faculty expertise in the department spans an unusually diverse range of endeavors. The graduate program accordingly includes a broad range of advanced seminars, along with coursework focusing on analyzing linguistic structure (e.g. syntax, semantics, phonology, phonetics), language ecologies (language variation and change, language and cognition), and methods (including field methods, archival research, experimental and corpus-based analyses, and computational modeling).
Graduate students have published their research in numerous journals, including Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, Glossa, Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Language Documentation & Conservation, Linguistic Inquiry, and Phonology; and regularly present their work at conferences, including the Annual Meeting on Phonology, the Manchester Phonology Meeting, New Ways of Analyzing Variation, the Cognitive Science Society Conference, the CUNY Conference on Sentence Processing, LabPhon, the Acoustical Society of America Meeting, the Linguistics Society of America, NELS, Sinn und Bedeutung, the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas, among others.
Graduate students actively participate in working groups, reading groups, and other activities, including Fieldwork Forum, Phorum, Syntax & Semantics Circle, and TABLE. These groups contribute to the strength of the program as hubs of intellectual exchange, professional networking, and community building.
Graduate students in the Linguistics department are eligible to apply to two Graduate Designated Emphases: the Designated Emphasis in Indigenous Language Revitalization, and the recently launched Designated Emphasis in Cognitive Science.
Our graduates build exciting careers in research labs, for-profit businesses, non-profits, government agencies, and higher education, among others.
Detailed description
The particulars of this program, describing the exact course requirements, details about the exams and required research papers are available in the Linguistics Graduate Program description. This document changes from time to time. Get previous versions of the program description for 2020, 2019, 2018, and 2017.