In the field of linguistics, we attempt to answer the following types of questions:

What is the relation between language and society?
Why and how does language change through time?
What is the relation between language and thought?
How do languages differ from one another?
How are all languages alike?
How do children learn language?
How do we understand and produce sentences?

Linguistics is concerned with discovering the organizing principles of human languages and applying these principles to the description of individual languages. Using systematic descriptions of language and language usage, linguists also investigate how language interacts with intellectual and cultural life. Linguistics has applications to teaching, speech-language pathology, and the applied sciences of communication engineering and computer science.

York's focus is on sociolinguistics, and as a result, the program can provide you with a social and cultural perspective on almost every aspect of the humanities and social sciences.

• Take advantage of our smaller class sizes and get to know your professors.
• Focus on core aspects of linguistics (phonology, syntax, morphology, and semantics), as well as sociolinguistics, linguistic variation and change, discourse analysis, psycholinguistics, and language acquisition.
• The department offers more than 20 different courses a year which investigate the relation between language and society, and between language and thought.

Questions?

Contact us at goyork@yorku.ca