Undergraduate Minor

This page describes the requirements for the Minor in Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. Specific questions should be addressed to the Linguistics Undergraduate Chair, Prof. Julie Legate.

Requirements

To receive a minor in linguistics, a student must complete any six course units in the linguistics department, excluding language courses. That is, language instruction offered under the LING label, such as American Sign Language and Irish Gaelic, does not count toward the minor.

The choice of courses will depend on the student's particular interests. The general introductory course Ling 001 is recommended, but not required. Here are some sample plans of study.

• For a student interested in how language use interacts with the broader society:
  • Ling 102: Introduction to Sociolinguistics
  • Ling 160: Introduction to African American and Latino English
  • Ling 161: Sociolinguistics of Reading
  • Ling 165: American Dialects
  • Ling 440: Pidgins and Creoles
  • Ling 450: Languages in Contact
• For a student interested in language in a historical context:
  • Ling 001: Introduction to Linguistics
  • Ling 054: Bilingualism in History
  • Ling 110: Introduction to Language Change
  • Ling 115: Writing Systems
  • Ling 310: History of the English Language
  • Ling 450: Languages in Contact
• For a student emphasizing the formal properties of language:
  • Ling 001: Introduction to Linguistics
  • Ling 105: Introduction to Cognitive Science
  • Ling 106: Introduction to Formal Linguistics
  • Ling 150: Introduction to Generative Syntax
  • Ling 330: The Sound Structure of Language
  • Ling 404: Morphological Theory

A single course from another department may occasionally be counted as one of the six courses in the minor if it is deemed to have particularly high linguistic content. This decision is made by the undergraduate chair.