The Language Requirement

Students in the Linguistics Department are required to undertake a one-year (three quarter) study of each of two languages. Classes used to satisfy this requirement will normally be drawn from one of the language sequences (most of which are fifteen credits) offered by various departments on campus. You may find it useful to consult the Arts and Sciences document "Beginning Language Courses Offered at the University of Washington." This annually updated list is prepared by Dick Newcomb of the Undergraduate Advising Center. Copies of this document are also available in the Linguistics Department.

A class on the (synchronic) linguistic structure of a particular language (e.g., FrLing 400 "The Syntactic structure of French") may also be used to satisfy one quarter of the language requirement (or may be applied to the elective requirement, but not both).

The languages studied to fulfill this requirement must be different from your native language and at least one of them must belong to a different major language family (e.g. Indo-European, Ural-Altaic, Sino-Tibetan, etc). The languages studied may both belong to the same family.

You may test out of one, but not both, of the languages by taking one of the University-administered language placement tests and being assigned to the second-year program (or higher). Contact the Office of Educational Assessment (543-1170) or the UW department that offers the language for more information about testing. The OEA offers language placement tests in French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Japanese.

If you are a non-native speaker of English and wish to count English as one of your languages for the Linguistics major, you may do so by satisfying the UW English competency requirement. Additional coursework in the structure of English, such as Ling 445 or 446, may also be helpful.

If you are seriously interested in linguistics, you should view the language requirement outlined above as a minimal course of language study. Regardless of whether or not you test out of the first year of a language, you are encouraged to take additional classes (beyond the first year) in one or both languages, particularly if you are planning to attend graduate school in linguistics. If you are not planning to go to graduate school, you should also keep in mind that, while a BA in Linguistics may not provide you with job-specific training, being fluent in a second language is a valuable (and marketable) skill.

Linguistics majors, like other students in the College of Arts and Sciences, must satisfy the College foreign language proficiency requirement. One year of the language study required for the Linguistics major will also satisfy the College requirement, provided that you earn at least a 2.0 in the third quarter of the language course (or failing that, at least a 0.7 in the fourth quarter).

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If you have any further questions or comments please contact us at phoneme@u.washington.edu

Last modified 2/11/03 by Joyce Parvi