Linguistics is the scientific study of human language, its structure and its diversity, how children learn it and how adults produce and understand it, how social practices shape and are shaped by it.

The Department of Linguistics at the University of Colorado at Boulder is a major center of interdisciplinary research in cognitive-functional linguistics. It offers a wide range of research programs that jointly target properties of spoken language. The orientation of the department is empirical: our approach to the structure and use of language confronts theory with firsthand observations. Analysis of video- and audio-taped interactions, acoustic measurements of speech, computational and statistical data analysis, psycholinguistic experimentation and fieldwork abroad and in local communities all contribute to this enterprise.

Linguistics News and Events

CU linguist J. Andrew Cowell awarded CU Foundation grant for documentation of Arapaho Narratives

Chad Nilep wins NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research Grant for sociolinguistic research in US and Japan

CU Linguistics researchers help native speakers save history: Boulder Daily Camera