About the Linguistics Department

A Department Built on Collaboration

Linguistics at UF began in 1970 as an interdisciplinary program spanning five departments (Anthropology, English, Germanic and Slavic Languages, Romance Languages, and Speech), reflecting a simple truth: language touches every discipline. We became a full department in 2010, and that collaborative spirit hasn’t gone anywhere. We continue to work closely with Languages, Literatures & Cultures, Spanish & Portuguese, and, increasingly, with UF’s computer science and data science communities as computational approaches to language take on new importance.

We offer the Ph.D., M.A. (thesis and non-thesis), and B.A., along with two undergraduate minors (Linguistics and TESL), an undergraduate TESL certificate, a graduate SLAT (Second Language Acquisition and Teaching) certificate, and a graduate certificate in Human Language Technology.

Our faculty’s expertise spans the full range of the field, from the building blocks of sound and structure (phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax) to how language carries meaning and functions in context (semantics, pragmatics), from how the brain acquires and processes language (psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, second language acquisition) to how language varies and changes across communities (sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, language documentation), and increasingly, how language can be modeled and processed computationally (computational linguistics, corpus linguistics). Whatever draws you to language, there’s a UF linguist working on it.