If You Want to Major in Linguistics But Your College Doesn’t Offer It: Is English the Right Choice?
The kitchen table was still covered in cereal crumbs when my 18-year-old Lila pushed her laptop across it toward me last April. The screen was open to the course catalog of the state university she’d enrolled in, the search bar still reading “linguistics major.” “None of the schools I got into have it,” she said, stabbing a cold blueberry with her fork. “Everyone says I should just major in English. Is that what I should do?”
Lila had been hooked on linguistics since her sophomore year of high school, when she did a final project on how Gen Z slang shifts between TikTok and Instagram, and ended up staying after class for 45 minutes talking about it with her English teacher. She’d always figured she’d major in it in college, but none of the in-state schools she could afford offered the full major. We’d scrolled Reddit threads for an hour, half the posters said English was the obvious backup, the other half swore by anthropology, communications, or even stats, and we left more confused than when we started.
A month later, we drove to campus for new student orientation, and got assigned to an advisor named Martha, who’d been advising undergrads there for 22 years. When Lila explained her problem, Martha leaned back in her creaky desk chair and laughed. “I was you, in 1991,” she said, and pulled out a tattered copy of her own undergrad transcript from the desk drawer. Back then, her school didn’t have a linguistics major either. She ended up majoring in English, and going on to get a master’s in linguistics later, so she had real experience with this question.
She said the first mistake most kids make is thinking the name of your major matters more than the classes you take. Almost every grad program in linguistics accepts students from related majors, as long as you’ve taken the core prep classes: intro linguistics, phonetics, syntax, and at least one class in sociolinguistics or psycholinguistics. Most schools that don’t have a full linguistics major still offer all of these as electives, through English, anthropology, or psychology departments. So the first concrete step anyone in this position can take is to search the entire course catalog for any class with “linguistics” in the name, write them down, and confirm you can fit them into your schedule no matter what major you pick. That’s non-negotiable, regardless of whether you pick English or something else.
From there, the choice between English and other options depends entirely on what part of linguistics you actually care about. If you love the social side of it—how language shapes culture, how it changes over time, how we use it to connect with different groups—English is a totally solid choice. Most linguistics electives live in the English department anyway, so you’ll often get priority registration for them, and the writing and close reading skills you build in an English major translate to almost any career after graduation, even if you change your mind about linguistics later. Lila’s friend Mia, who wants to work on language access for immigrant communities, picked English, and she’s already lined up two sociolinguistics electives for her first year. It fits exactly what she wants to do.
But if you’re into the science side of linguistics—like psycholinguistics, how the brain processes language, or computational linguistics, building the AI that powers chatbots and translation tools—English isn’t the best choice. Those fields need stats and research methods classes that English rarely requires. For that, you’re better off majoring in psychology for psycholinguistics, or stats or computer science for computational linguistics, and just fitting in all the linguistics electives you can as extra classes or a minor. Anthropology is another good middle option most people forget: if you’re into studying how language works in different communities, anthropology will give you the ethnographic fieldwork training that English doesn’t, and most departments have linguistics-focused faculty anyway.
After our meeting with Martha, we got mint chocolate chip ice cream from the student union, sat on the curb outside because all the picnic tables were taken, and Lila’s cone dripped down her wrist onto her new college hoodie. She said she’d always assumed English was the default, but she actually wants to study how kids learn second languages, which falls solidly into psycholinguistics. That lined up exactly with what Martha had told us.
The next week, on Martha’s suggestion, Lila emailed the professor who teaches intro linguistics at the school to ask for advice. He wrote back in two days, gave her a year-by-year class plan, and even invited her to join a small research project he’s doing on dialect variation in the state, starting this fall. That’s another concrete step anyone can take: reach out to the faculty who teach those linguistics classes, most are happy to help you map out a plan, even if there’s no official major.
Right now, Lila’s settled on majoring in psychology, minoring in English. She gets the cognitive science and research training she needs for the kind of linguistics she cares about, and the minor lets her access all the linguistics electives in the English department. It’s not the straight linguistics major she dreamed of when she was 16, working on that slang project at her desk after school. It’s a little messy, building your own path instead of following the pre-made one. But so far, it fits.
We still don’t know if she’ll end up going to grad school for linguistics, or if she’ll switch directions and become a high school language teacher, or something else entirely. That’s part of college, right? You don’t have to have the perfect named major to work toward the thing you care about. For now, this is working, and that’s enough.
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