An illustration from 1807 depicts a view of the buildings of Yale College

About the department

The Department of Linguistics at Yale embraces an integrative and interdisciplinary approach to the study of the language, based on the premise that an understanding of the human language faculty arises only from the combination of insights from the development of explicit formal theories with careful descriptive and experimental work. 

Members of the department offer undergraduate and graduate courses in which theoretical inquiry proceeds in partnership with historical and comparative studies, fieldwork, experimental work, cognitive neuroscience, and computational and mathematical modeling. 

Faculty expertise includes all of the major domains of linguistics (phonetics, phonology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics) and spans a wide range of languages, with particular expertise in Australian, Germanic, Romance, Native American, and Indo-Iranian languages. 

The department also hosts the American Sign Language and Cherokee Language programs at Yale. Courses in both languages can be applied toward the Yale College language distributional requirement. 

“The relatively small size of our department allows us to create a close-knit community, where we show respect and appreciation, we acknowledge the humanity of each individual and we support one another in our journey of discovering and learning and in our efforts to disseminate knowledge.” 

Raffaella Zanuttini, Professor and Chair
Raffaella Zanuttini Lavitt