Linguistics MA/MRes - what have you done with it?

[marimo]

Always been fascinated with Linguistics and, in my forties, wondering about doing a conversion MA. Have been a journalist (8 years) and languages teacher (a decade). Interested to know what you might have done career wise with a Linguistics qualification. SALT? Anything else?

I don't think you could become a SALT via a linguistics masters.

I wasn’t sure it was a direct qualification for SALT as such. I’m just wondering what people have gone on to do after studying linguistics.

This SOAS MA list looks rather attractive:

“Recent School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics graduates have been hired by:

Africa Matters
Amnesty International
Arab British Chamber of Commerce
BBC World Service
British High Commission
Council for British Research in the Levant
Department for International Development
Edelman
Embassy of Jordan
Ernst & Young
Foreign & Commonwealth Office
Google
Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies
Middle East Eye
Saïd Foundation
TalkAbout Speech Therapy
The Black Curriculum
The Telegraph
United Nations Development Programme
UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency
Wall Street Journal”

Though obviously it doesn’t say exactly what sort of roles they’ve taken up.

I did a linguistics MA in my 40s. I then went on to do a PhD and lecture at a university. Before that I was a school and college teacher.

You can go on to do SALT (I know two people who did this after their linguistics MA). Others on the course went into journalism and teaching.

I can honestly say that the MA changed my life. In the UK, Linguistics is often something people discover later in life as so few native speakers of English in this country know much about their own language, let alone other languages. I thoroughly enjoyed the process of learning and it has led to a whole new career which is much more satisfying than the work I had before.

Wonderful - thank you!
Yes, linguistics seems to be a bit of a secret club.

Yes, impressive list of destinations although would be great to know whether the roles involved using the knowledge base.

Bumping for more! 🙂

A lot of TESOL / English for Academic Purposes roles require an Applied Linguistics or TESOL degree although depending on where you aim to teach, you may also need related teaching experience.

I have an MA and PhD in linguistics and I teach English language to non-native speakers.

I think a fair few people go into academia after studying linguistics. There are very few jobs that involve using linguistics directly, unless you're lucky to get a position as a lexicographer or something. Could help in teaching literacy and languages as well.

I did an MSc in computational linguistics, worked in project management for a speech tech company for a while then moved into project/programme management in the civil service. Don't really use my linguistics any more but it was a great foundation and my career is interesting, secure and has good progression. If you have good enough maths then computational linguistics is a great route to go down. Most of my classmates still work in the industry.

SALT and teaching are obvious choices, but Applied Linguistics is really multidisciplinary, so once you become interested in particular niche you can go on and do Phd and stay in academia. There's also publishing, marketing, forensic linguistics, translation (if you speak another language).

I've heard tech companies are hiring lots of linguists to do things like machine translation. For example, dull jobs like transcribing speech to phonetic codes which can be used to train the speech recognition machines. But I'm sure there are good jobs in there too.

UCL has a speech & language MSc that leads to speech therapy word.