Ph.D. candidates have been completing their doctorates in our department every year since 1956. We offer a Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics with multiple concentrations.

Doctoral students in Linguistics establish themselves as experts in specific areas of language investigation, building on coursework comprising the M.A. program. An unusual feature of Linguistics at Indiana University is the requirement of a substantive minor outside of the department, which establishes each student with a research relationship with faculty outside the department. Students commonly are on the ground-floor of creating cross-disciplinary research agenda, opening up new ways of looking at language.

Doctoral students develop research skills to open up investigation into an aspect of language. Since the doctoral program is one of the largest in the nation, our students are developing expertise in many different areas, ranging from acoustics to speech motor control, to logic and discourse representation, from how languages adapt words from other languages to how speakers adopt patterns to move across language groups, from grammatical theory to learning a second language.

Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field which addresses the use of computers to process or produce human language. Linguistics contributes to this field an understanding of the special properties of language data, and also provides theories and descriptions of language structure and use. Computational linguistics is largely an applied discipline concerned with practical problems. Typical applications include: natural language processing, machine translation (translating from one language to another), speech synthesis, speech production, information retrieval (finding relevant documents or parts of documents in large collections of texts), cognitive modeling, and, in general, almost anything dealing with natural language interfaces.

Since our Linguistics department has a long history of research and teaching of languages from all over the continent of Africa, we offer a doctoral concentration specifically to support students who are developing expertise in linguistic inquiry into the languages of Africa. The program, though similar to the general Ph.D. program, requires engagement in offerings specifically targeting African linguistics, and is administered by our faculty who are leaders in the study of the languages of Africa.

Find more information about Ph.D. degrees in our Student Portal