An Evolving Linguistics Curriculum
Our graduate curriculum has grown tremendously in the last few years and has recently been reviewed and refined to align with emerging research, student needs, and best practices in linguistic pedagogy. Our evolving curriculum gives graduate students a stronger foundation and greater flexibility to shape their academic path. With clearer course sequences and more robust requirements, students gain the depth needed to conduct advanced research across multiple subfields.
Fall 2025
New PhD Course Requirements
We've reevaluated the PhD course requirements to ensure our students are developing a reasonably substantial breadth and depth in our program. PhD students must take at least eight foundational courses and four elective courses, including at least one seminar or equivalent research-oriented course, for a total of twelve core courses, or 48 credit hours. The new course requirements can be found on the PhD program page and in the updated PhD Handbook.
Who Does This Impact?
These new course requirements apply to all PhD students admitted in Fall 2025 and onward. While PhD students in previous cohorts are not bound by the new course requirements, they are highly encouraged to take as many of these courses as they're able to. It's in every student's best interest to take advantage of the breadth and depth of this new curriculum.
Recent Curriculum Updates
We’ve clarified our policy on reading course variants: a foundational course can be taken as a reading course variant if it's being used as an elective, but to satisfy the foundational requirement, the course must be taken in its full four-credit version.
The department is excited to introduce newly structured course sequences in syntax, sound, and morphology, which involved renaming existing courses, as well as creating a range of new courses that will begin being offered in Fall 2025. A few of these new courses include: Statistical Methods in Linguistics, Languages of Africa, Phonetics, Phonology, Topics in Sociolinguistics, and Prosody.
We’ve clarified our policy on testing out of foundational courses—highlighting that exceptions are rare and must be earned through demonstrated, substantial expertise. Students testing out of a course must still complete an equivalent or more advanced course in that subfield to satisfy the foundational requirement. Additionally, PhD candidacy now follows the successful defense of the second qualifying paper.
2026-2027
Linguistics Course Catalog
For a full and updated list of linguistics courses, reference our most recent course catalog for the 2026-2027 academic year.
While we try to maintain a consistent course offering pattern, due to faculty leaves, enrollment numbers, and curricular changes, we can't always accommodate this. Use the links below to check out the courses that are currently being offered and our course offering history.
Featured Courses - Fall 2026
Check out some of our featured courses for the upcoming Fall 2026 semester. For a full and updated list of Linguistics courses and their descriptions, explore our course catalog.
LING 107 Language, Memory, and Landscape
Humans have thrived in diverse, often harsh environments all over the earth for many millennia by passing on important bodies of knowledge of landscape and climate across many generations. How does this work? In this course we will study the deep relationship between people, their environment and...
LING 205 Intro to Historical Linguistics
This course is designed to give an introduction to the principles of linguistic variation and change, and to examine their practical application in the interdisciplinary subfields of historical linguistics and historical sociolinguistics. Topics covered include diachrony and synchrony, genetic relations, the...
LING 215/415 Languages of Africa
About 2,000 of the world’s 7,000 languages are spoken in Africa. The diversity that characterizes these languages is exceptional, but little known to non-specialists. In this course, we will learn about the languages of Africa: the diversity of their linguistic structures (including famous features that are...
LING 237/437 Phonology
This course introduces students to the core principles and analytical tools of phonology—the study of how speech sounds are organized in human language. Through examination of diverse phonological patterns from a typologically broad set of languages, students will explore the most active and exciting...
LING 526 Morphological Theory
This course is an overview of advanced topics in morphology. The course first introduces students to the landscape of possible morphological theories and what different implications they hold for linguistic theory more broadly, since morphology interfaces with syntax, phonology, and semantics. The...
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