• MA in Linguistics – Native American Linguistics and Languages at the University of Arizona is offered as a 1-year program plus one summer doing coursework.
  • It is an on-campus program available on a full-time basis and offered at the University of Arizona's main campus in Tucson.
  • It is a 30 unit master's degree program offering a variety of electives.
  • This degree program is oriented towards community language activists who wish to train in the kinds of skills and experience needed to work on maintaining, revitalizing, and documenting their native languages.
  • Students interested in MA can either be speakers or second language learners of their language, or ones who have studied a particular Native American language and have close contact with that language community.
  • The specialized nature of this degree focuses on indigenous languages and meeting the needs of Native American communities: due to the rapid decline in the use of heritage languages tribal communities have pressed for practical linguistic training to:
    • revitalize, maintain, and document indigenous languages;
    • provide skills and expertise for Native American linguists to develop teaching grammar and other educational materials;
    • promote understanding of indigenous peoples' educational issues at every level of policymaking;
    • enhance and promote understanding of complex factors leading to language choice, language shift, and language loss, and;
    • work with archival media (such as audio legacy audio recordings and historical documents) to enrich the language record and to produce viable teaching materials.
  • This program also often serves as a stepping stone for those students who wish to advance to the Ph.D. level in linguistics or related disciplines.