Computational applications of linguistics, such as speech synthesis, speech recognition, and machine-assisted translation, have also become increasingly important.

The undergraduate and graduate programs develop intellectual skills that are essential to professional careers or advanced degrees. Our courses provide analytical tools that can be applied to virtually any subject. They also help enhance critical thinking, satisfy broad intellectual interest, and enrich personal knowledge.

The ?majors can be applied directly to various professional fields. They also serve as excellent preparation for pursuing advanced degrees in linguistics and other fields such as English, anthropology, psychology, sociology, computer science, and foreign languages. TESL is an important part of our program and especially compatible with degrees in education and liberal studies. A Japanese minor can be profitably combined with majors in such areas as business, international relations, linguistics, and literature.

Minors in Chinese and Japanese are also available for students with plans to pursue careers in various areas, such as international business, marketing, economics, art and literature, etc., where a knowledge of language and culture would be useful.

The B.A. Option in Computational Linguistics is for those students interested in text processing, forensic linguistics, software design, machine translation, and other professions dealing with the interface between computers and humans.