If Your College Doesn’t Offer A Linguistics Major: Should You Choose English Or Another Similar Major?
Last Saturday, I found my 17-year-old Lila slouched over the kitchen table, half-eaten oatmeal growing cold on the placemat, her laptop propped open to the course catalog of her top-choice state university. A crumb of blueberry scone stuck to the corner of the screen, and she’d scribbled a messy list of majors on a leftover grocery receipt: English? Anthro? Comm? She looked up, frowning. “None of the schools I got into have a standalone linguistics major. Everyone says English is the next best thing, but is that actually true?”
Lila’s been obsessed with how language works since she was 14, when she got in a fight with her history teacher over grading African American Vernacular English as “grammatically incorrect” for a final paper. She spent that summer diving into free YouTube lectures on sociolinguistics, did a regional science fair project on how Gen Z slang spreads across TikTok’s regional communities, and by junior year, she knew she wanted to study linguistics in college. We’d both assumed one of her target schools would have the major, but it turned out three out of four of her acceptances don’t. Smaller liberal arts colleges and mid-sized state schools often cut standalone linguistics programs to save budget, even when they still offer individual linguistics classes.
As a former high school college counselor, I know not to just Google a generic answer and call it a day. I reached out to a retired linguistics professor I’d met at a college counseling conference a few years back, and Lila’s current college advisor, and we met for coffee at the shop down the street from our house the next Wednesday. Rain tapped the window, our lattes went lukewarm by the time we got through all the questions, and what came out wasn’t the vague “follow your passion” line I expected. It was concrete, practical stuff I hadn’t considered before.
First, the professor said, most people fixate on the name of the major, but grad programs and employers don’t care that much. If you want to go to grad school for linguistics, what matters is that you’ve taken the core prerequisite classes: at least one intro to linguistics, one phonetics/phonology, one syntax, one sociolinguistics, and two years of a foreign language. It doesn’t matter what department those classes live in. So the first thing to do, before picking any major, is search the entire college course catalog for the word “linguistics”, no matter what department it’s filed under. A lot of schools tuck linguistics classes into English, anthropology, communication, even speech pathology. Lila did that search right after our coffee, and found three core linguistics classes in the English department at her top choice, a phonetics class in speech pathology, and a linguistic anthropology class over in the anthropology department—more than enough to hit all the prereqs for any grad program.
So when is English actually the right call? It’s a solid fit if your main interest is in humanities-focused linguistics: sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, language and culture, or discourse analysis. Most English departments that host linguistics classes will let you build a concentration or center your electives around language even without an official major. For Lila, that works perfectly. Most of the classes she needs are already in the English department, majoring in English gives her lots of practice writing and close reading that translates to any linguistics path, and it leaves her flexible if she decides she doesn’t want to go to grad school right after college—she can get a job in content writing, education, or nonprofits easily with an English degree.
But English isn’t the only option, and it’s not always the best option. If you’re more interested in computational linguistics (the field that powers AI language models, search engines, and translation tools), cognitive linguistics, or speech and language pathology, majoring in another field is actually a better move. The professor told me she had an undergrad who majored in computer science, took five linguistics classes as electives, and got into a top computational linguistics PhD program over applicants who’d majored in linguistics because he had the technical background most traditional linguistics undergrads don’t get. For someone interested in that side of the field, pairing computer science (or cognitive science) with the available linguistics electives is way more valuable than majoring in English.
One concrete step we took that made everything feel less messy: after mapping out the classes she needed, Lila emailed the advisor of the department hosting most of the linguistics classes to ask for help mapping out her four years. The English department advisor at her top choice wrote back within two days, offered to meet her when she visits campus next month, and even offered to supervise an independent study for her senior year so she can do a deeper project on AAVE, which is what she wants to focus on long-term.
Right now, Lila’s still leaning towards English with a concentration in linguistics. She’s tossed around the idea of adding a minor in anthropology to get that extra linguistic anthropology class, but she’s not sure if it’s worth squeezing in an extra class every semester. We don’t know if she’ll end up going to grad school, or if she’ll take a job right out of college working in education or content. What we do know is that not having a standalone linguistics major doesn’t mean she has to give up on studying what she loves. It just means doing a little extra digging to find the classes that are already there, hidden in other departments, and picking the major that fits what she wants to do after college, not just what the course catalog names.
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