Our Department

What is language and how is it related to other human faculties?
What is unique in languages and what is universal?
How is language acquired and how does it change?

Linguists consider language as a cultural, social, and psychological phenomenon. As one of the cognitive sciences, we provide a link between the humanities and social sciences, as well as education and speech & hearing sciences.

The Stanford University Department of Linguistics is a vibrant center of teaching and research.  The range of languages studied is diverse and the scope of active research and teaching is broad--including:

• acquisition
• computational linguistics
• historical linguistics
• morphology
• phonetics
• phonology
• pragmatics
• psycholinguistics
• semantics
• sociolinguistics
• syntax
• typology
• variation

See our Research Overview for more about what Linguistics means to us