Ph.D. students in the Department of Linguistics build on coursework to establish themselves as experts in specific areas of language investigation.

An unusual feature of the linguistics program at Indiana University is the requirement of a substantive minor outside of the department, which enables each student to form research relationships with faculty outside the department. Students are commonly on the ground floor of creating cross-disciplinary research agendas, opening up new ways of looking at language.

Since the doctoral program is one of the largest in the nation, students develop 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. The Ph.D. teaches a wide range of skills in research and teaching that enable graduates to move smoothly into postdocs or tenure-track positions. 

Two concentrations are offered:

• Ph.D. in Linguistics with a Concentration in Computational Linguistics
• Ph.D. in Linguistics with a Concentration in African Languages and Linguistics