Linguistics degrees and beyond, any experience?

[Kango]

DS considering Linguistics degrees, possibly in combination with Languages or Psychology. He is attracted to the idea of forensic linguistics, or voice recognition tech as an ultimate aim, but appreciate things might change a lot over time. Have looked at the modules and structure at a number of universities. Has anyone experience of Linguistics, is it as interesting as it seems? And in terms of career is it pretty futile thinking you will get to use it and you should accept you are learning transferable skills to be used in a range of grad jobs? He is not (currently) interested in SALT or teaching. Y11 so no grades yet, but would not be aiming at Oxbridge.

Sorry, no help here but following with interest. My dd yr12 is thinking of doing psychology and linguistics.

If I recall not too many universities do the course, might have changed though. I would say the skills are highly transferable. I know someone who went into academia and another who was very successful in a commercial business.

I think Uni is about do a subject you will really enjoy (unless medicine) and generally the opportunities follow.

Dd is currently studying Linguistics, has also taken language and psychology options and planning a year abroad. She is thinking of Speech and Language Therapy afterwards

My friend did linguistics at Lancaster uni. After graduating she did a journalism course and worked as a reporter for many years. She enjoyed it but went for a local paper and ended up changing careers because the opportunities in local print news rapidly disappeared.

She went into care work and I think now has an admin role in her local council. It suits her with her children (lone parent)

DD is hoping to do English Language & Linguistics at either York or Lancaster in September.

She is also interested in the forensic side of things, but language development too. Teaching is of no interest to her either!

Having spoken to lecturers a both Universities, and one at Sheffield, I was reassured by the employability of graduates with this degree.

It's very transferrable; one lecturer had been head hunted by a firm in Silicon Valley to work on AI tech! Journalism, politics, marketing, business.....all are possible!

DD has chosen a degree that interests her; she found her love of English Language during A levels, and totally changed what she planned for her future as a result!

She looked really closely at how the various courses were built - and chose Universities that allowed her to build the degree she wants

I did a BA and MA in Linguistics. I loved it because it's so interdisciplinary. I wrote one dissertation about the interactions between music and speech stress in chant, and one about language policy in education where children speak one language exclusively at home and then go to school and learn in another. We could do elective modules on evolutionary stuff, computational stuff, child language acquisition, Old English, semantics and pragmatics (where we learnt formal logical notation), local sociolinguistics... There's a lot of variety.

I'd say aiming at transferable skills is the best way forward, but to look for them in unexpected places. For example, we studied Optimality Theory, which looks at constraint hierarchies to achieve phonological (and others - we just used it in phonology) outcomes - I now use the same principles I learned to order conditional formatting rules in Excel, which I wouldn't have anticipated! We also did a great module where we had a native speaker from a very little-studied language community and we got to help create the description of the language. That was amazing.

Relatedly, moving towards computational linguistics and programming languages can be useful, especially nowadays.

A lot of my fellow graduates have gone into teaching (secondary English or primary), or SaLT. I work in information management.

Having a second language is always useful just because English grammar isn't taught very well beyond basic parts of speech type stuff - means a bit less catching up about cases and such like.

That's all I can think of for now but I may be back!

Interesting fact - Cambridge linguistics academic wrote Harry Potter Parseltongue language. It had to have the structure of a new language rather than random words. I bet he has done financially very well!

All interesting stuff, thanks. Spaghetti your obvious love for the subject shines through, and I'm not surprised - I wish I'd done it!

I second what @SpaghettiNotCourgetti said! I wish I could forget what I studied a nd go back to study it all over again! I did my BA at Leeds, joint with a language and I've never looked back! I did travel and teach, then did an MA, lectured around europe, then did a PhD working with refugee children on language policy in their schools. It has been amazing and I've had some varied and well paid roles (no longer academic). I'm not from a n academic or wealthy background, the subject was so interesting and I was so passionate about it! That simply drove me on!

My background is linguistics.
Have been: Home Office fast track graduate, forensic linguistics researcher, teacher.

I had no interest in becoming a teacher when I graduated. I wouldn't change it for the world now.

Part-time I run onto Mumsnet threads and tell the grammar police that they don't know nearly as much as they think they do.

Most language degrees carry a linguistics component and that might be a more catholic option and give more choices in the future. Even as part of another degree the linguistics component is divided into various disciplines, so you'd look at socio/psycholinguistics, forensic linguistics, general linguistics etc.

@Kango I really, really loved it. It's one of those subjects which can take you to a lot of interesting places and I think it's generally quite underappreciated. A lot of people don't know what it is or don't see the point in it, which I find so weird given how important and integral language is to us as a species.

@Livingmagicallyagain I would love to go back and study it all again, too! I remember coming out of some lectures and seminars having learnt this really cool stuff and having my mind totally blown - I probably looked really starry eyed but I just thought that what I was studying was so utterly cool.

@SpaghettiNotCourgetti yep, it's so varied and relevant to pretty much everything! It's human language! Love all the info that pops into my mind from my course in different areas of real life too, such as when my children started talking or when people ask advice about learning a language, or when I hear about language policies. Materials and policies I developed during my PhD are now being used to help Ukrainian students in the schools here (I'm in ROI now).

I love the phonetics lab, it was so 70s yet we did some really cutting edge stuff!

@SpaghettiNotCourgetti your DD sounds exactly like my DS, he's also applied to Lancaster to study English Lang and Linguistics and his passion for English has really developed during A levels (he's also doing maths/physics but they've not inspired him as much.)
He doesn't know what he wants to do as a career (he likes the sound of forensic linguistics) but more importantly am sure the degree will keep him motivated and interested. So good to see all these positive comments!

Sorry meant to tag @beenrumbled in above post not @SpaghettiNotCourgetti (but your comments are v helpful😀)

If he's got some IT/ maths aptitude, combining it with an AI or machine learning course would make him unbelievably employable. A lot of logic is basically the same as linguistics anyway. That opens up things like translation software, building software that automatically extracts information from text or speech, content generation for a million and one applications, automatic modding etc!

I did foreign languages with a bit of linguistics and went into a communications agency. Any kind of language/ linguistics degree gives you an incredible understanding of language in general and how people use it which is such a valuable skill in many different roles and also something that not many others will have.

I did English Language and Linguistics at Durham. I loved it and found it very interesting, but I've done nothing with it. I regret that, and have recently been wondering whether it's too late to completely change careers by getting a speech therapy qualification.

My daughter is doing a modern languages and linguistics (Oxbridge). She's really enjoying it, but prefers the linguistics part and I think rather wishes she had gone for psychology and linguistics instead. She's always been very interested in languages so linguistics was an obvious choice. She blows hot and cold on literature so is less keen on the language part as it is quite literature intensive on her course. She has found it more science-based than she realised: how the sound is produced, looking at statistics. She has been quite glad of her AS maths. It probably isn't leading directly into careers, though it would be an excellent starting point for speech therapy, a good starting point for pyschology, but that and other options that really use linguistics would probably require graduate study.

@Gherkingreen DD is also doing Maths and a science A Level - Biology.

She loved both York and Lancasters courses, and the applicant holder days. Lancaster just shaded it I think. She was really impressed with the course and lecturers and students.

@stodgystollen the potential career routes you talk about sound incredible. Will pass info on to DS and encourage him to think beyond the next stage.

@beenrumbled yeah DS really enjoyed the offer day at Lancaster and the course content/lecturers pipped it for him over other universities.

It does seem odd that on the CUG site, quite a lot of university linguistics courses have no score for job prospects. Some do of course. I would say that Linguistics students don’t have any advantage generally for jobs but some careers clearly lead on from these degrees. It depends what students want and where their interests lie and what jobs they actually apply for!

DC is graduating from Linguistics this summer and has a graduate offer from a top City law firm. So it seems potentially useful if you want to be a lawyer. She had an offer from a big consulting firm too, so ditto.

@MindPalace
Except neither of them will have purely looked at her degree. She will have had to jump through a lot more hoops to get offered top grad jobs. However I’ve no doubt some people are better suited to these roles and others to speech therapy,

@TizerorFizz I’m not saying they did. But maybe Linguistics degrees can help people learn the communications skills that can help them get jobs.

DD switched to Linguistics halfway through her course and didn’t have an idea about potential careers until quite late on. I suppose at the very least it shows that a Linguistics degree doesn’t hold you back from accessing a wide range of careers mentioned on this thread.

She has enjoyed it anyway, and the course has seemed fascinating to me.

If he thinks he'll find it interesting, he almost certainly will and will thrive - it's a fantastic degree and students often make brilliant communicators (obviously a very transferrable skill) because they understand about human interaction and language processing.

Worth knowing in advance though that forensic linguistics is a highly specialist field with only a few positions/opportunities nationally. That's not necessarily a problem, but might be worth knowing if he's not the travelling sort!