MA Language Documentation Linguistics

Do you have a passion for linguistics and would like to keep up with technology trends? This concentration provides a broad spectrum application of digital resources for language analysis. It covers analysis from the level of speech sounds to connected discourse marking, making you competitive for different fields that require linguists. Some Natural Language Processing (NLP) careers for linguists utilize language analysis skills with preferred but not required skills in programming. Through study of some under-resourced languages, students will also gain valuable skills to potentially create teaching materials for first, second, or low-resourced languages. This concentration provides broad background in language construction and linguistic competency.

The world’s languages, approximately 7,000 of them, are disappearing at an alarming rate. Each language encodes unique knowledge about the ecologies – both animals and plants – of the societies that are centered on the languages spoken. To preserve and employ this data to further our understanding of this essential part of what it means to be human, linguists and interested members of language communities work together to collect and analyze linguistic data, and to preserve it in archives for use in the future.

UNT's Department of Linguistics offers courses on scientifically sound and ethically appropriate data collection methodologies, gold standard archiving practices, and methods for data mining. All these lead to research projects on non-Indo-European languages and provide students with extraordinary opportunities to learn about new cultures and customs.