Career Opportunities
What can you do with a degree in linguistics? Linguistics graduates have built careers in foreign service, law, international business, translation and interpreting, lexicography, teaching English to speakers of other languages in the US and abroad, information technology, technical writing and publishing, communication consulting, DEI administration, intercultural and diversity consulting, data analytics and social media. Students who augment their linguistics training with computer science coursework 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.
Linguistics students are also well equipped for further training in many fields, including:
- Anthropology
- International Affairs
- Law
- Journalism
- Communication, Speech, Language and Hearing Science
- Computer Science
- Education
- Foreign languages
- Philosophy
- Psychology
And of course, students with BA and MA degrees in linguistics often pursue graduate study in linguistics and closely related areas, including psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, forensic linguistics, computational linguistics, linguistic neuroscience and speech pathology. 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.
Please see the links below to learn more about careers in linguistics: (1) a 2023 article in the journal Language that analyzes where people with degrees in linguistics are finding jobs, (2) information on the "Linguists at Work" speaker series sponsored by our department, (3) a list of CU Linguistics alumni with careers in industry, and (4) a workshop on careers in linguistics by Dr. Alexandra Johnston at Georgetown, which is designed for BA and MA students in linguistics at CU Boulder. These will give you lots of information about why linguistics is a smart, career-oriented choice for your degree!
Linguistics education and its application in the workplace - article in Language