For Non-Majors

The Department of Linguistics offers several courses open to students with no previous training in the field. These courses provide a general introduction to the subject matter and technical methods of linguistics, both for students who do not plan to major in Linguistics and for prospective majors.

Students with no previous background in linguistics are encouraged to approach the field by taking a freshman seminar or a 100-level course. The current 100-level courses are the following.

Term: Fall 2022

Ling 033 - Words, Words, Words: The Structure and History of English Words

Meggings. Perpendicular. Up. Ain’t. Eerily. Bae. The. These are all words in the English language, but, like all words, they have different meanings, functions, and social purposes; indeed, the meaning and function may be different for the same word depending on the context in which we use it (whether spoken or written). In this course, we explore the wonderful world of words. We look at how we create new words (and why), how we change the meaning of words, and how words have been lost (and revived) over time. As we do so, we look at debates over words and their meanings now (such as the feeling by some that ain’t is not a word at all) and historically (such as the distaste for subpeditals for ‘shoes’ in the sixteenth century), and how words can be manipulated to insult, hurt, and discriminate against others. We look at a wide range of texts by well-known authors (such as Shakespeare) as well as anonymous online bloggers, and we make use of online tools like the Google Ngram viewer and the Corpus of Historical American English to see how words change over time. At the end of the course, I hope you see how we make sophisticated use of words and how studying them opens up new ways for you to understand why other people use words the way they do and how you can use words for various purposes in your own speech and writing.

Enrollment limited to first-year students. Preregistration required; see under First-Year Seminar Program.

This course can be applied towards the Humanities and Arts Yale College distributional requirement.

This course may satisfy a historical distribution requirement for English majors with permission from the instructor and the DUS. The English Distribution Request Form is available at https://english.yale.edu/undergraduate/deadlines-and-forms.

Term: Fall 2022
MW 9am-10:15am

Ling 110 - Language: Introduction to Linguistics

This is a course about language as a window into the human mind and language as glue in human society. Nature, nurture, or both? Linguistics is a science that addresses this puzzle for human language. Language is one of the most complex of human behaviors, but it comes to us without effort. Language is common to all societies and is typically acquired without explicit instruction. Human languages vary within highly specific parameters. The conventions of speech communities exhibit variation and change over time within the confines of universal grammar, part of our biological endowment. The properties of universal grammar are discovered through the careful study of the structures of individual languages and comparison across languages. This course introduces analytical methods that are used to understand this fundamental aspect of human knowledge. In this introductory course students learn about the principles that underly all human languages, and what makes language special. We study language sounds, how words are formed, how humans compute meaning, as well as language in society, language change, and linguistic diversity.

This course can be applied towards the Social Sciences Yale College distributional requirement.

Term: Fall 2022
TTh 1pm-2:15pm

Ling 119 - How to Create a Language: Constructed Language and Natural Language

This course explores how languages get invented, drawing inspiration both from well-known constructed/invented languages like Klingon, Dothraki, and Esperanto, as well as from natural languages. Students learn about the primary linguistic aspects of natural language—Phonetics, Phonology, Morphology, Syntax, and Semantics—and learn how those aspects of grammar are used in various constructed languages. Students, working in small groups, create and describe a new language (or at least a fragment of a new language) over the course of the semester, using the principles learned in class.

This course can be applied towards the Social Sciences Yale College distributional requirement.

Term: Fall 2022
MW 2:30pm-3:45pm

Ling 217/617 - Language and Mind

The structure of linguistic knowledge and how it is used during communication. The principles that guide the acquisition of this system by children learning their first language, by children learning language in unusual circumstances (heritage speakers, sign languages) and adults learning a second language, bilingual speakers. The processing of language in real-time. Psychological traits that impact language learning and language use.

This course can be applied towards the Social Sciences Yale College distributional requirement.

This course meets during the Reading Period: the week between the last week of classes and finals week.

Term: Fall 2022
TTh 2:30pm-3:45pm
Term: Spring 2023

Ling 106 - Illusions of Language

Introduction to linguistics, with special emphasis on sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics. Study of grammatical illusions: expressions the parser mistakenly accepts as grammatical despite making little sense and grammatical sentences which the parser has difficulty processing. Emphasis also on illusions and misconceptions about language, such as the belief that women speak more than men, that “vocal fry” can harm your voice, and that double negation is illogical.

This course can be applied towards the Social Sciences Yale College distributional requirement. 
Term: Spring 2023
MW 1pm-2:15pm

Ling 107 - Linguistic Diversity & Endangerment

“How many languages are there in the world?”—what does this question even mean? What would a satisfying answer look like? This class comprises a geographical and historical survey of the world’s languages and attends to how languages can differ from one another. According to UNESCO, more than half of world languages (virtually all of which are spoken by indigenous communities) will have gone extinct by the end of the century. We interrogate notions like language endangerment, shift and death, and we consider the threats that these pose to global linguistic diversity. There is a striking correlation between the geographic distribution of linguistic and biological diversity, although proportionally, far more languages are endangered than biological species; the question of how (and why? and whether?) to respond to that situation is a matter of serious import for the 21st Century. This course surveys the various ways in which the world’s linguistic diversity and language ecologies can be assessed—and discusses the serious threats to that diversity, why this might be a matter of concern, and the principle of linguistic human rights. Students have the opportunity to investigate a minority language in some depth and report on its status with respect to the range of issues discussed in class.

Crosslistings: ERM 207

Term: Spring 2023
TTh 4pm-5:15pm

Ling 109 - History of the English Language

The evolution of English from its beginnings nearly 1500 years ago to the language of Beowulf, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Jane Austen, Melville, Twain, Langston Hughes, Bernie Sanders, Maya Angelou, and Cardi B. An overview of the ‘Englishes’ that populate our globe, including a look at the ways that technology affects language.

This course may satisfy the Medieval, Renaissance, 18th/19th century, or 20th/21st century literature requirement for English majors with permission from the instructor and the DUS. The English Distribution Request Form is available at https://english.yale.edu/undergraduate/deadlines-and-forms.

This course can be applied towards the Humanities and Arts Yale College distributional requirement. 
Term: Spring 2023
MW 9am-10:15am

Ling 112 - Historical Linguistics

Introduction to language change and language history. How do people use language, and how does that lead to language change over time: sound change, analogy, syntactic and semantic change, borrowing. Techniques for recovering earlier linguistic stages: philology, internal reconstruction, the comparative method. The role of language contact in language change. Evidence from language in prehistory (doing archaeology with language).

This course can be applied towards the Humanities and Arts Yale College distributional requirement.
Term: Spring 2023
TTh 2:30pm-3:45pm

Ling 116 - Cognitive Science of Language

The study of language from the perspective of cognitive science. Exploration of mental structures that underlie the human ability to learn and process language, drawing on studies of normal and atypical language development and processing, brain imaging, neuropsychology, and computational modeling. Innate linguistic structure vs. determination by experience and culture; the relation between linguistic and nonlinguistic cognition in the domains of decision making, social cognition, and musical cognition; the degree to which language shapes perceptions of color, number, space, and gender.

This course can be applied towards the Social Sciences Yale College distributional requirement.
Term: Spring 2023
MW 2:30pm-3:45pm

Ling 211 - Grammatical Diversity in U.S. English

Language as a system of mental rules, governing the sound, form, and meaning system. The (impossible) distinction between language and dialect. The scientific study of standard and non-standard varieties. Social attitudes toward prestige and other varieties; linguistic prejudice. Focus on morpho-syntactic variation in North-American English: alternative passives (“The car needs washed”), personal datives (“I need me a new printer”), negative inversion (“Don’t nobody want to ride the bus”), “drama SO” (“I am SO not going to study tonight”). 

This course can be applied towards the Social Sciences Yale College distributional requirement. 
Term: Spring 2023
MW 11:35am-12:50pm

Director of Undergraduate Studies

Any questions about the undergraduate program can be directed to the DUS below.