About the Department

The current UC Berkeley Department of Linguistics was begun in 1953 by the distinguished Sanskrit and Dravidian scholar Murray Emeneau, and subsequently chaired by Mary Haas, a leading scholar of both American Indian and Asian languages. There are at present 15 faculty and 6 retired professors associated with the department. With approximately 50 graduate students in progress toward the M.A. and Ph.D. degrees, Berkeley linguists remain committed to the empirical, historical, and theoretical study of linguistic structure within a broad linguistic, cultural, and cognitive context.

The Department has strengths in many areas. Phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, historical linguistics, and cognitive linguistics are all well represented by the faculty's interests. The Department emphasizes research that seeks to discover and provide explanations for general properties of linguistic form, meaning, and usage. We are also committed to linguistics in the service of endangered languages, and support a number of language revitalization programs for Native Americans.

Much of our research is potentially interdisciplinary and/or involves the careful documentation of individual languages, language families, and their histories. The Department has always had a strong commitment to the study of American Indian languages, and also has special strengths in African, Asian and European languages. Many of the faculty and graduate students participate in the activities of the Institute of Cognitive and Brain Studies, where they interact with scholars from a number of other disciplines (Psychology, Anthropology, Philosophy, Computer Science, Education, etc.)

Facts

The department receives an average of 140 applications to the graduate program every year; approximately 16-20 students are admitted each year.

On average, 8-10 students enroll in the graduate program each year.

On average, 5-6 students complete their PhD dissertations each year. Our PhD graduates have gone on to a variety of careers in academia and industry.

The time it takes to earn a PhD varies according to individual circumstances and research topic. Most PhD degrees are completed in 6-8 years. (In recent years, the mean, median and mode years to the PhD are 6.8, 6.5 and 7.5, respectively.)