What is Linguistics?

How does language work? What is its structure, in sentences, words and sounds or signs? How do we learn it? How do we use it to communicate? How does it change over time?

Linguistics is the science of human language. From the individual level to the social, language permeates our experiences and human interactions. Language enables us to communicate with people around us, to listen to our neighbors, and we learn new languages to cross boundaries, to forge new connections both locally and on a global scale.

At Carolina we provide students with the tools to analyze the languages of the world and the languages and dialects spoken in our state. We offer courses in formal grammar, sentence structure, sound patterns and meaning, computational linguistics, language acquisition and sociolinguistics, and more. We offer an Undergraduate Major and Minor, an MA in Linguistics, and students can pursue a Ph.D. in Hispanic Linguistics in conjunction with Romance Studies.