Career Opportunities
What can you do with a degree in linguistics? Linguistics graduates have built careers in foreign service, law, international business, marketing and branding, translation and interpreting, lexicography, teaching English as a Second Language in the US and abroad, information technology, technical writing, publishing, and diverse forms of social media. Students who augment their linguistics training with computer science coursework, for instance, are highly valued by companies that develop natural-language processing tools for speech recognition, speech synthesis, automatic translation, and information retrieval. Even if you do not intend to work in a language-related profession, the linguistics major can benefit you: business and industry employers are increasingly aware that linguistics majors have well developed skills in complex problem solving and pattern detection.
If you want to know more about the field of linguistics, what the linguistics major is about, and how you can use a BA degree in linguistics, go to Why Major in Linguistics? on the Linguistics Society of America website. We also encourage you to visit Dr. Anna Marie Trester’s website Career Linguist for up-to-date ideas about careers for students who have studied linguistics. Dr. Trester, a linguist who is currently employed at FrameWorks Institute, has given several career-oriented workshops to undergraduate and graduate students here at CU Boulder and at other universities. She is a friend of the show! For more ideas on “where the linguists are working,” see her highly informative article called "BRIGHTEN.”
Finally, linguistics majors often pursue graduate study in linguistics and closely related areas, including anthropology, communication, computer science, education, foreign languages, international affairs, law, journalism, neuroscience, philosophy, psychology, speech, language, and hearing science, and speech pathology.