Program Overview
Linguistics at Western
Linguistics was initially taught as an undergraduate subject area in Anthropology at Western, including a combined Honors program in Linguistics and Psychology. In recent decades, several linguists joined the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, and links were forged with other Faculties. This led to a wealth of experience and interest in linguistics as a cohesive discipline which crosses traditional disciplinary boundaries.
At the undergraduate level, an Interfaculty program in linguistics was created in 2000, confirming the strength of our discipline at the University of Western Ontario. Over the years, linguists on campus have been able to obtain a Canada Research Chair in Linguistics, a research facility for linguistics (the Theoretical and Applied Linguistics Laboratory), and an Interdisciplinary Initiative grant, among other institutional supports.
Objectives of the Program
The objective of the MA program in linguistics is to foster scholarship and research in the discipline, both for students who are planning on continuing with a PhD program in linguistics and for those who will be seeking professional work in a range of fields (such as education, communicative disorders, speech technologies, or elsewhere) for which a background in linguistics is either required or very useful.
Our diverse faculty, made up of researchers from various fields (including Anthropology, Communication Sciences and Disorders, Education, French Studies, Languages and Cultures, Philosophy and Psychology) offer students direct training in current research methods from a wide range of theoretical and empirical perspectives, enabling them to undertake independent research of their own in linguistics.
