The Department of Linguistics pursues a large and diverse research program, in areas as varied as formal grammatical theory, sociolinguistics, second language acquisition, computational linguistics, laboratory phonology, conversation analysis, and many other areas. Research is conducted on languages from a variety of families and regions; the department includes specialists in South Asian Languages, African Languages, East Asian Languages, Spanish, Arabic, Mayan and others — not to mention English.

Interdisciplinary connections form an important part of our research profile, and much of our work is performed in collaboration with other faculty from the School of Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics, the Beckman Institute, and other units on campus.