Dr. Bill Salmon
Welcome to the UNT Department of Linguistics! The field of Linguistics draws from the humanities, social sciences, and STEM disciplines, and as a student at UNT Linguistics, you will benefit from all of these disciplinary influences. From the traditional humanities you will learn to think critically and creatively, to write exceedingly well, and to analyze linguistic problems of individuals, groups, cultures, and across the human race. Your Linguistics degree is rounded off with the quantitative and scientific training of the social science and STEM disciplines, providing you with an even greater set of skills for complex problem solving, not to mention an extra boost in the job market after graduation.

At UNT Linguistics you will receive training in the core areas of the field—phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. You can also pursue specific interests alongside our faculty expertise, such as language and law, language learning and acquisition, language variation, sociolinguistics, endangered language documentation, constructed languages in gaming and film, teaching English as a second language, poetics, historical linguistics, computational linguistics, language and AI technologies, and much much more.

Faculty work on endangered languages, extinct languages, contemporary languages and slang, poetry and literature, and every kind of language in between. We study the languages of the Americas, Europe, Asia, South Asia...a couple of us even focus on Texas English!

We’re a tight-knit group of faculty and students, and we love to have social events. Our students do hands on research with faculty; they’re members of the UNT Honors College; and, they go on to get good jobs upon graduation in a dizzying range of fields. For the BA and MS graduates who wish to take their education even further, we also place students in top PhD programs and law schools.

Please check out our course offerings and faculty profiles, and feel free to reach out to any of us by email if we can provide any additional information about Linguistics.

We look forward to seeing you on campus!

Bill Salmon
Professor and Chair of Linguistics