The Linguistics Graduate Program fosters graduate student research, networking, and collaboration with scholars from across the country and the globe. Faculty members act as mentors and advocates for our students, often engaging in joint research projects. The Linguistics Graduate Student Association (LGSA) hosts the annual Central Kentucky Linguistics Conference (CKLiC) under Department sponsorship. CKLiC provides a place for graduate students in linguistics to engage in professional development with eminent scholars, as well as showcase their own work in a full conference environment. The Department also hosts a number of activities and events, such as multiple reading groups in areas of student interest, an invited speaker series, and various multimedia and gaming initiatives that bring linguistics to a broader audience.
About the program
Our Doctoral program in Linguistics emphasizes the systematic investigation of language as it relates to social and cultural life.
Departmental specialties include
Additional department strengths include: Phonetics, Sociophonetics, Perceptual Dialectology, Dialect Geography, Historical Sociolinguistics, Constructed Languages, and Linguistic Anthropology
Faculty
Our linguistics faculty demonstrate a remarkable breadth and depth of expertise in the areas of sociolinguistics, computational linguistics, and historical linguistics. Our dynamic, growing department and focused on becoming a hub for the study of sociolinguistics in the United States.
Department resources include computational, corpus linguistics lab, and phonetics labs; as well as access to the Collaboratory for Research in Computing for Humanities (RCH) through the department’s engagement with that unit. The Department is also home to the Linguistic Atlas Project (LAP) and other ongoing research projects such as the Young Appalachians’ Living Language (YALL) corpus. Department of Linguistics faculty have been awarded research grants and fellowships by prominent public and private funding agencies, including the American Philosophical Society, Fulbright, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).
Applicants must meet the Graduate School admission requirements.
The GRE is not required for admission to this program.
College of Arts & Sciences
1615 Patterson Office Tower
Lexington, KY 40506-0027
859-257-4964