By Nicole North

The academic year 2025–2026 marked the 60th anniversary of Simon Fraser University. In honour of the sixtieth year’s closing, the Department of Linguistics is taking a look back at its history and taking aim at the future. 

Linguistics has been taught at SFU since the university’s founding in 1965, within what was then the Department of Modern Languages. Given the increase in the visibility of linguistics as a scientific field in the 1960s, the department name was changed in 1977 to the Department of Languages, Literature and Linguistics (DLLL). 

Georgina Black served as a senior staff member from 1981 to 1996 and offers a unique perspective on this time period. “It was a bustling and energetic group dynamic, alive with invigorating and sometimes raucous debates among the German-language instructors, the research linguists and the Russian-language faculty, oftentimes interjected by comments and complaints from the laboratory technicians. I have fond memories of the annual parties where each member brought a homecooked dish from their cultural heritage. I remember the memorial in honour of the first head of the DLLL, Geoffrey Bursill-Hall, who was also one of the original founders of Simon Fraser University.” 

By 1987, it was decided that this one large department would be dissolved into three separate departments: the Department of Languages, the Department of Literature, and the Department of Linguistics. Linguistics officially became a department on September 1, 1988 and has grown in the number of faculty and students each ensuing decade. 

As the department has grown, it has expanded from focusing on applied linguistics and language education to include theoretical and experimental linguistics. Courses have been added to teach emerging topics such as computational linguistics, modern sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics, as well as innovative new skills and techniques within traditional topics such as morphology, phonology, semantics and syntax. 

The Indigenous Languages Program (INLP) joined with SFU Linguistics during 2018. INLP focuses on Indigenous language documentation, maintenance, and revitalization. The current program is a continuation of the award-winning SFU Kamloops program co-founded by Marianne Ignace and Ronald Ignace in 1988. There was a significant increase in course requests that began around 2016–⁠2017, when large community programs were initiated for the Squamish Nation, Hul̓q̓umi̓num’ communities and within the Yukon. 

Currently, INLP academic offerings include three undergraduate credentials as well as the graduate certificate and Master of Arts program. INLP alumna Kaitlyn Cunningham recently received the Lieutenant Governor’s Medal for her extensive work in Halkomelem language revitalization. Distinguished SFU Professor and Director of Indigenous Languages Marianne Ignace was just announced as an appointee to the Order of British Columbia, the highest form of recognition bestowed by the Government of British Columbia. 

Research labs at SFU Linguistics have been making waves for decades. Royal Society of Canada Fellow and Distinguished SFU Professor Maite Taboada developed the highly acclaimed Gender Gap Tracker by using big data analysis to measure how Canadian media represent women’s voices. A new research lab has been launched this year by Assistant Professor Sara Ng, the Computational Speech Lab (CSL), using similar techniques to analyze data from large language models to study topics such as online disfluency prediction and the acoustics of autistic stuttering. 

Career options for our alumni have expanded exponentially as skills in areas such as natural language processing, large language model analysis, and applied phonetics are gaining value in our increasingly data-driven world. The joint major program in Computing Science and Linguistics has produced many successful career paths, such as recent alumna Boey Kwan who now works in fintech. 

Applied behaviour analysis is another rewarding and lucrative career path available to Linguistics alumni. Aishah Ismail recently shared about her journey to become a certified Behaviour Analyst. Aishah originally intended to use skills learned as part of the Certificate in the Linguistics of Speech Science to pursue a career in speech-language pathology, but she was inspired to pivot to behaviour analysis to help children with developmental disabilities. 

In early 2026, the department launched the SFU–Canterbury Pathway to MSLP, a partnership with the University of Canterbury (UC) in New Zealand. The Pathway provides direct entry for undergraduate Speech Science students to UC’s Master of Speech and Language Pathology program to gain credentials to practice speech-language pathology in Canada. This new partnership helps to address the gap between the increased demand for speech language pathologists (SLPs) and the limited options for graduate school programs in British Columbia. 

Laurel Weldon, Dean of SFU’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, envisions a very bright future ahead. “The Department of Linguistics, which as a Charter department is celebrating its 60th anniversary, has a long track record of accomplishment of which it can be very proud. The department houses several programs that are priorities for FASS, including the Indigenous Languages Program and the Social Data Analytics program. Linguistics faculty include several distinguished researchers, and the students go on to pursue meaningful and successful careers. The exciting new collaborations with other departments, universities and communities around the province and across the world lead me to expect another 60 years and beyond of even greater success.”