Middlebury

What do linguists do? What are possible career paths?

Sociolinguistics researchers (and/or linguistic anthropologists) may work to preserve dying languages, study the relationships between languages, both extant and extinct, or act as consultants for programs and policies in education or other sectors (e.g., bilingual education, language policy, language rights, etc.). Computational linguists work on projects such as text-to-speech or speech-to-text applications, voice recognition, automatic translation, information retrieval, e-learning, etc. Applied linguists often focus on Second Language Acquisition, especially the teaching of English to Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL). Further areas of specialization include translation, sign language, speech pathology, forensic linguistics, media analysis, and many others.