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Term Info: Fall 2026
Need an elective for Fall 2026? Register today! learn more →
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Claudia MacDonald wins 2026 Becker Undergraduate Award
“It feels really exciting to win the Becker Award. Receiving this recognition has been a huge confidence boost, especially because I have struggled with my academic confidence in the past.” learn more →
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Put yourself out there: Taking initiative to achieve MSLP admission
“What began as a simple elective course ultimately led me to a career path that combines my interests in education, language, and helping others.” learn more →
Hear from our students
Watch videos of our undergraduate students sharing their experiences at LING:
“What I love about linguistics is that language is such a human thing. And what linguistics does is instead of enforcing or prescribing rules for how people should speak, it describes and seeks to understand how languages evolve and develop and how they work.”
— Student of LING 220: Introduction to Linguistics
“My favourite part of this class is developing language games and gaining real-world experience with kids visiting Science World. The course truly brings linguistics to life and you get to see what the science of language is about first hand.”
— Student of LING 350: First Language Acquisition
The science of language
Linguistics is the scientific study of language, including language analytics, how languages evolve, and how we use language to communicate. Linguistic research advances knowledge on how we socialize, how we understand or misunderstand one another, and how we use language to interpret the world around us. Areas of study include sounds (phonetics and phonology), words (morphology), sentences (syntax), pattern and variation analysis (corpus linguistics), narratives and conversations (discourse analysis), meaning (semantics and pragmatics) and the study of individual languages, including Indigenous languages.
SFU Linguistics is one of the largest and most diverse linguistics programs in Canada. We offer a wide range of courses about language at the undergraduate level, including a certificate program in the Linguistics of Speech Science. We also offer graduate programs for MA and PhD degrees. The work conducted in our research labs aims to address questions such as how language is acquired in early childhood, how second languages are acquired, and what insights can be gained from computational analysis of language data.
Career options related to linguistics continue to expand as the value of skills in areas such as natural language processing, discourse analysis, practical application of phonetic science, and sociolinguistic analysis is being recognized in our increasingly data-driven world. Linguistics graduates may choose to work in language analytics, big data processing and management, forensic linguistics, ESL instruction, speech language pathology, and publishing.
News and events
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July 15, 2026
Claudia MacDonald wins 2026 Becker Undergraduate Award
“It feels really exciting to win the Becker Award. Receiving this recognition has been a huge confidence boost, especially because I have struggled with my academic confidence in the past.” -
July 06, 2026
Perseverance pays off: From waitlist to MSLP admit
“Being waitlisted doesn’t mean that your application isn’t enough. It just highlights how competitive SLP programs are, and should be used as a moment of reflection and growth.” -
July 06, 2026
Put yourself out there: Taking initiative to achieve MSLP admission
“What began as a simple elective course ultimately led me to a career path that combines my interests in education, language, and helping others.” -
June 22, 2026
Virtual info session: SFU direct entry pathway to Canterbury MSLP
Transition seamlessly from your BA at SFU to MSLP at Canterbury, New Zealand. Learn more at our Zoom info session on July 16 at 10:00am. -
June 21, 2026
Committing to Indigenous language revitalization: Qwuy’um’aat Elliott shares her story
“Learning Hul’q’umi’num is going back to something that has always been mine, something that was lost within me, but always in me at the same time.” -
June 16, 2026
Family of four celebrates graduation from SFU Indigenous Languages
“We are incredibly proud of what can be achieved through family support, commitment, and working toward goals together.” -
June 04, 2026
Characterizing Al use in writing
Join us for a colloquium by Marzena Karpinska. “My work includes areas like machine translation of creative texts, story generation, summarizing long texts, verifying claims about book-length content, and multilingual long-form question answering.”