COURSE DETAIL
This course examines the linguistic processes in language contact situations and how these relate to both societal and individual aspects of multilingualism. The first part of the course introduces the concepts of sociolinguistics that are needed to address issues of multilingualism and language contact, while the last part of the course develops this interdisciplinary perspective further by treating as a case study the island of Aruba, where multiple languages are spoken by overlapping linguistic communities.
Linguistics Abroad
Take your linguistics studies international to analyze how languages are structured, learned, and used—linking phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics to real-world communication across cultures. International study immerses you in diverse speech communities and language policies, expanding how you design fieldwork, document languages, and test hypotheses about acquisition, processing, and change. You’ll advance in experimental and computational methods, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and historical linguistics while tackling projects on endangered language documentation, variation and change, and speech perception and production. Build your portfolio through corpus creation, elicitation and field methods, lab phonology, and collaborations with community partners—strengthening analytic rigor, ethical practice, and the ability to translate linguistic insight into education, technology, and language preservation.