Linguistics has moved and is adding new classes for undergraduates. Most linguistics classes and faculty, as well as the linguistics minor, are now located in the Romance Languages Department. Most exciting of all, there is a proposal for a Linguistics major. It is currently moving through the program approval process and, if all goes well, could be up and running as early as Fall 2010.
There are now 20 linguistics minors, who are combining coursework in linguistics with such majors as communication sciences, English, German, Russian, psychology, and anthropology.
Faculty welcome inquiries from any student who may be interested in linguistics. Linguists can go on to graduate study in education, English as a Second Language or second language acquisition, foreign language study, voice recognition/artificial intelligence, speech pathology, and so on, in addition to linguistics itself. In fact, any student pursuing a career in a field that values an understanding of spoken and written language might find happiness with a linguistics minor or major.
Presently, even core linguistics courses have other prefixes, such as CMSI, ANTH, etc., making them a little confusing to find sometimes. All the courses are listed under Linguistics in the Spring Schedule of Courses, however, by next fall the core courses in linguistics will have LING prefixes.
Finally, the faculty are excited that Romance Languages Professor Guillermo Rodriguez will offer the first official LING class this spring: LING 196 Second Language Acquisition. Cross-listed with psychology, this class is open to anyone interested in the fascinating process of how a second language is learned.
For further information about linguistics at UVM, please contact Julie Roberts at Julie.Roberts@uvm.edu.