Linguistics

Linguistics is the study of language both as a faculty of mind and as a social institution. Linguistics at William and Mary is administered through the Roy R. Charles Center as an interdisciplinary program.

Linguistics majors learn about speech sounds, word formation, and sentence structure in the world's languages, along with models for representing linguistic knowledge in the mind and tools for discovering the structure of different languages. They also study language change, including the history of English, and language variation within communities, including its social and political bases.

Linguistics offers a wide range of courses leading to a major or minor. Our largest courses are capped at 30 to enable close mentoring from faculty.