About this Program
Language is one of the most remarkable of all human capacities. As linguists, our goal is to understand and explain language from a scientific perspective—how languages are learned and represented in the mind, how they’re structured, how they vary and change, what they tell us about human nature and culture.
The linguistics program at Eastern Michigan has a rich history of pursuing these questions both in and outside the classroom. In addition to providing award-winning teaching and mentoring, our faculty have worked with students on linguistic issues ranging from documenting indigenous languages of South America, to studying the nature of speech perception, to examining socially charged language in the media, to searching for what is at the very core of all languages.
Our award-winning faculty have research specializations in phonetics, phonology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, morphology, typology and language universals, psycholinguistics, language acquisition and minority/endangered languages.