Welcome to the Linguistics Program at San Francisco State University

The Linguistics Program at SFSU offers BA and MA degrees which provide students with a solid grounding in the tools of language analysis. At the undergraduate level, students begin to explore the patterns of sounds, words, sentences, and conversations in a variety of languages and speech communities. What similarities are found between English, Spanish, and Swahili, for example? What patterns do Turkish and Japanese share? How can you characterize the difference between ‘empty’ and ‘hollow’, when the dictionary lists them as synonyms? How do conversations among teenagers in San Francisco differ from conversations among 40 year olds?

Students interested in any field involving language analysis, including but not limited to law, education, anthropology, sociology, psychology, as well as linguistics, benefit from preparation in examining language data with the rigorous methods of the discipline. Students who plan to teach language gain a valuable background in the structure of English along with a deeper understanding of how languages are acquired. Undergraduate majors are encouraged to take courses in other languages as well as courses investigating language from the perspectives of other fields, such as Speech & Communication, Psychology, Computer Science, and Anthropology.

At the MA level, course offerings in contemporary linguistic theory cover a broad spectrum of the areas of the discipline phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, discourse analysis, conversational analysis, metaphor theory, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and fieldwork. Students gain experience in collecting original linguistic data, analyzing their findings, and preparing them for both oral and written presentation. The focus of the MA program is to build a strong foundation in data collection and analysis, with the added benefit of providing exposure to many of the windows through which language can be viewed.