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 data (typically conversational data), acoustic measurements of speech, computational and statistical analysis, psycholinguistic experimentation and fieldwork in local communities and abroad all contribute to this enterprise.

In July and August of 2011, the Department hosted the 2011 Linguistic Institute, an international biennial summer school for scholars and students of linguistics co-sponsored by the Lingustic Society of America.

Linguistics News and Events

Linguistics Department holds Graduation Recognition Ceremony

CU Linguistics ranked by NRC in top 15 of US linguistics programs

CU Doctoral student Nicholas Williams wins Fulbright Award