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Are there jobs available for Linguistics majors?

I've been passionate about language for the majority of my life, and I've finally settled on my major. Linguistics with an emphasis in English is my passion, but I assume the jobs are limited since I hadn't heard of this degree before applying to college.

Any #linguistics fanatics care to share their success stories?

Thanks!

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John’s Answer

Hi Lexi, in my experience, I've found that a master's degree in some field of linguistics is the absolute minimum for getting a job - usually a doctorate is required, depending on the field you choose to enter. There's computational linguistics and natural language processing (translation, AI and more at tech companies), there's childhood developmental linguistics (usually working in a language lab at a university), language documentation (going out into the field and recording speech samples and building a grammar to preserve dying languages), language change/historical linguistics (classroom instruction/textbook writing, but also creating constructed languages for movies/TV/video games)...lots of fields out there. I'd recommend identifying the sub-field(s) you like, and speaking with faculty members about what study through the graduate level/jobs looks like for those sub-fields. That might help narrow things down for you, and help you find a career path. Hope this helps!
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Daniel’s Answer

We hire a few linguists at Google. But not many, and mostly only computational linguistics. Also mostly only master's/PhD candidates. The other tech companies working on NLP similarly hire some (Amazon, Microsoft, but then also smaller places you'll likely never have heard of). Outside of tech, I dunno. The military or intelligence agencies hire some, though I think a lot of that is focused more on translation and crypto.


My brother has an undergraduate linguistics degree, and there weren't many options. I think your first intuition, that jobs are limited, is correct.


Not impossible, especially if you get some computation and big data processing experience, but probably pretty hard.
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