Department of Linguistics

Chess is defined by a small number of pieces, and rules for their movement around the board.  But there are an infinite number of ways for an individual chess game to play out.

Language is like that.  A language is a potentially infinite set of possible utterances.  But any speaker of a language can instantly tell a whether a sentence 'follows the rules' or not, even if they have never heard it before--even if they don't know all the words!

Linguistics is the scientific study of language--the search for the units, rules, and internal logic of a language, and of all human languages.

The Department of Linguistics at the University of Manitoba is proud to be the world centre for the study of indigenous languages of Canada, and has traditionally held particular interest in the Algonquian language family. In addition, we are becoming the Canadian centres for the linguistic study of Persian language, and American Sign Language (ASL). Traditionally we have stressed fieldwork and the collection and analysis of primary data in our staff and students' research activities. With the completion of the Experimental Linguistics Laboratory, we are looking forward to further building our programs with experimentally derived data. Our students and faculty maintain research projects on languages as 'every-day' as Canadian English and as 'exotic' as the languages of Papua New Guinea.

The department offers Advanced and General major (Bachelor of Arts) and minor degree programs through the Faculty of Arts, and both MA and PhD programs through the Faculty of Graduate Studies. We offer courses as part of the joint ASL/English Interpretation Program with Red River college. We also offer electives in Clinical and Developmental Linguistics for students preparing for gradute work in Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology.

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