Linguistics Graduate Certificate
Want to advance your understanding of language while exploring its impact on thought, culture, and society? Our linguistics graduate certificate gives you the foundation to see how we use language to construct meaning and shape linguistic systems. Through this program, you will learn the impact of language across different contexts and disciplines.
Program Overview
The Linguistics Graduate Certificate program equips students to study and understand the nuances of language, preparing them for careers in education or abroad.
You will learn about topics such as phonetics, syntax, semantics, and even psycholinguistics, preparing you to examine language through analytical and cultural lenses. Additionally, our flexible course options allow you to tailor your courses to fit your interests, whether that’s studying a specific language—Spanish, French, German—or learning more about English.
This program is a great fit for students who want to learn techniques for analyzing languages, teach a foreign language in K-12 schools or abroad, or even go on to become university professors.
Why Study Linguistics?
At UT, the linguistics graduate certificate provides students with flexible coursework, opportunities to make a real-world impact, and avenues to become expert communicators. Whatever their path, students will learn to make insightful connections and bridge gaps across languages.
What Sets Us Apart
Choose from Flexible Coursework
With course offerings in psychology, linguistics, and four different languages—English, Spanish, French, and German—you can tailor your classes to learn the linguistics of any language you’re interested in.
Make a Real-World Impact
A linguistics graduate certificate teaches you to understand the way language impacts identity and provides you with cultural competency, giving you skills that stand out in the job market and make you highly desirable to employers.
Become an Expert Communicator
Language is in everything we do. With courses that teach you to research language and professional skills that prepare you to teach it, you’ll graduate with skills that’ll help you make the impact you want.
What Can You Do with a Graduate Certificate in Linguistics After Graduation?
A graduate certificate in linguistics from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville offers study within a broad range of linguistics concentrations as well as opportunities to gain exposure in fields where linguistics overlaps with other disciplines. Our program prepares students to pursue advanced study within areas such as theoretical, historical, descriptive, and applied linguistics.
Graduates of our program thrive in careers in many fields across linguistics disciplines. Many go into scientific fields such as audiology, speech pathology, cognitive sciences, and aural rehabilitation. Other graduates go into technology and data, working as a computational linguist or computer language coder. You could also go into education, as a professor, teacher, curriculum developer, or foreign language instructor. You could be a translator in domains such as government, business, and the public sector, or you could bring your linguistics knowledge into journalism, editing, forensic linguistics, or product naming. Even marketing and advertising could be the place for you in foreign language advertising support or multicultural marketing.
With the opportunity to learn about all kinds of linguistics concentrations, you will be prepared to go into higher education or the workforce with the resources you need to be successful in whatever specialty you choose.
Featured Courses
LING 540 Translation, Linguistics, and Context
In this course, students will learn to apply concepts and ideas from linguistics to the field of translation. Primarily drawing from linguistic pragmatics, the systematic study of human language in context, this course provides students with hands-on resources to successfully negotiate source and target language words, grammar, and texts/utterances in light of several layers of context, a process that is at the center of conceptualizing and crafting effective translations.
WLC 400 Psycholinguistics
This course serves as an introduction to the field of psycholinguistics, examining research on the acquisition, comprehension and production of language. It will also explore relationships between theory and data from psycholinguistic research with a focus on experimental methods used to examine questions regarding language acquisition, representation, and processing.
GERM 510 German Phonetics and Advanced Grammar
This course includes advanced work in phonetics, pronunciation, and selected topics in German grammar. This course is ideal for teachers and prospective teachers.
ENGL 575 Issues in Second/Foreign Language Rhetoric and Composition
This course includes an examination of cross-linguistic and cross-cultural issues in the development of academic writing proficiency in a second/foreign language.
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