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. 

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