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The Berkeley Linguistics Department has a rich and distinguished tradition. From 1901 to 1906, the first Linguistics program operated under the direction of the classical philologist Benjamin Ide Wheeler, who was also President of the University of California. After that time most linguistic work at U.C. Berkeley was done through the Anthropology Department where, under the direction of the noted anthropological linguist Alfred Kroeber, extensive efforts were devoted to the recording and describing of unwritten languages, especially American Indian languages spoken in California and elsewhere in the United States.

The current Department of Linguistics continues these traditions alongside other areas of expertise that have developed since. Constituted 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 the 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, 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.)




Contact Information:
1203 Dwinelle Hall,
U. of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, CA 94720-2650
Phone:
general: (510) 642-2757
grad info: (510) 643-7224
Fax: (510) 643-5688
E-mail:
linginfo@uclink.berkeley.edu