Bachelor of Arts - English - Linguistics

The English Department at SF State provides opportunities for students to study in a variety of subfields that make up the English major. Join us and become part of a racially, linguistically, and culturally diverse community of learners engaging in a dialog between extant histories and experiences, and new ideas and literacies. Linguistics is a concentration within the English BA. At the undergraduate level, students begin to explore the patterns of sounds, words, sentences, and conversations in a variety of languages and speech communities. What similarities are found between English, Spanish, and Swahili, for example? What patterns do Turkish and Japanese share? How can you characterize the difference between “empty” and “hollow” when the dictionary lists them as synonyms? How do conversations among teenagers in San Francisco differ from conversations among 40-year-olds? Students interested in any field involving language analysis — including but not limited to law, education, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and linguistics — benefit from preparation in examining language data with the rigorous methods of the discipline. Students who plan to teach language to gain a valuable background in the structure of English along with a deeper understanding of how languages are acquired. Undergraduate majors are encouraged to take courses in other languages as well as courses investigating language from the perspectives of other fields, such as speech and communication, psychology, computer science, and anthropology.