Phonetics is the study of speech sounds as physical entities (their articulation, acoustic properties, and how they are perceived), and phonology is the study of the organization and function of speech sounds as part of the grammar of a language. The perspectives of these two closely related subfields are combined in laboratory phonology, which seeks to understand the relationship between cognitive and physical aspects of human speech.

Language documentation aims to capture and preserve the linguistic practices of a given community through audio and video recording, transcription, and annotation. It describes the grammar of endangered language varieties and how these varieties are used.

Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the ability to comprehend and produce language, either as their first or second (third, etc.) language. The study of language acquisition provides evidence for theoretical linguistics and has practical applications in language pedagogy.

Historical linguistics is the scientific study of how languages change over time, which seeks to understand the relationships among languages and to reconstruct earlier stages of languages. At UGA, our primary focus is on historical Indo-European linguistics – the history and development of the Indo-European family of languages, which includes English.

Corpus linguistics is a rapidly growing methodology that uses the statistical analysis of large collections of written or spoken data (corpora) to investigate linguistic phenomena.

Computational linguistics is the scientific study of language from a computational perspective. It includes computational modeling of linguistic phenomena and the use of computational techniques to process natural language for research purposes and practical applications.

University of Georgia Linguistics Faculty and Graduate Students presented at the 94th Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Society of America, in New Orleans, Louisiana, January 2-5, 2020.

Rachel Olsen: "Processing our feelings: An acoustic analysis of emotional prosody in naturalistic speech."

University of Georgia Linguistics Faculty and Graduate Students presented at the 2020 American Dialect Society annual conference in New Orleans, Louisiana, January 2-5, 2020.

Dr. William A. Kretzschmar, Dr. Margaret Renwick, Joseph Stanley, Katie Kuiper, Lisa Lipani, Michael Olsen, and Rachel Olsen: "The View of Southern Vowels from Large-Scale Data."

Congratulations to Department of Linguistics Assistant Professor, Dr. Jon Forrest for receiving an Innovation in Multicultural Curriculum Award from Franklin College of Arts & Sciences to support the development of his new course, Language, Race, and Ethnicity in the US.

Due to emerging events and restrictions due to COVID-19, the Germanic Linguistics Annual Conference 2020 has been cancelled. 

The UGA Departments of Germanic & Slavic Studies and Linguistics will host the 26th Germanic Linguistics Annual Conference from April 2-4 at the Georgia Center for Continuing Education.