Jobs related to linguistics/language acquisition or migration

[Clarelita]

I am thinking of a career change and have always been interested in linguistics, migration and language acquisition so would be interested in doing something related to those areas but I don't really know where to start.

I grew up in the UK with immigrant parents from two different countries and with two different mother tongues. I have always been fascinated by the reasons for migration across the world and the integration of these people in the host country. As part of that I have always been particularly interested in how some manage to learn the language very well while others still struggle to express themselves after 20 years.

Looking for any career suggestions that would involve any of these concepts as I really don't know where to start.

I did a TEFL course and briefly taught English as a foreign langue but teaching is definitely not for me.

What do you currently do, and would you want to do significant retraining? I’m a speech and language therapist who’s moved into research and love both the clinical and research side of it. The things you’re interested in are relevant to it and there’s a massive need for more bilingual and multilingual SLTs, we’re currently a quite homogenous profession and so not serving many bilingual communities well.

I am an accountant at the moment. I would expect to have to go back to university to start a new career in the areas I mentioned but obviously open to anything that doesn't need a relevant degree too.

Speech and language therapy is not something that I had ever thought of. Obvious to me now as my son is struggling with pronunciation in his languages and I have often asked myself if it could be down to his multilingualism. I was hoping he would grow out of it and pick up the correct pronunciation but it doesn't seem to be the case. You've reminded me that I need to look in to speech therapy for him.

I will also start exploring it as a career option. Great tip!

AI?

It’s quite an intense course and some jobs have a crazy caseload, but there are a lot of opportunities to take it in so many directions, and once you’re qualified it’s the norm for most roles to be quite parent friendly in terms of flexible and part time hours. And I do think it’s endlessly fascinating. Feel free to message me in the future if you decide to go for it or want some inside perspective, I got into it from an unrelated background and didn’t know many things that would have been useful to know for interviews etc!

What you want falls into anthropology- which can be a very broad area. I have no idea about job prospects though but worth looking into.