Linguistics jobs
What kinds of jobs can you get with a linguistics major? What career options are there for linguistics PhDs who don’t want to go into academia?
The linguistics jobs series interviews people who have a linguistics major, linguistics minor, masters in linguistics, or doctorate in linguistics, about what they’re doing with their careers, advice for current linguistics students looking at the job market, what kinds of work experience they had, and what they wish they’d known about trying to get a job with a linguistics degree.
General lingcomm skills: how to explain why your linguistics degree is relevant in a job interview or application
- Linguistics + X
- LingComm - a series on communicating linguistics to non-linguists
- Advice for writing pop linguistics articles
- Differences between writing pop linguistics, teaching, and even other pop science
- Livetweets and slides from a talk I gave about getting linguistics out of the ivory tower
- Advice for linguistics profs looking to support your students in getting jobs beyond academia
- Lingthusiasm Bonus #3: How to sell linguistics skills to employers
- Notes from a LingComm mini-course that I taught at the 2017 Linguistics Summer Institute: LingComm day 1: Goals, LingComm day 2: Terminology and the explainer structure, LingComm day 3: The Curse of Knowledge and short talks, LingComm day 4: Myth debunking and in-person events, LingComm day 5 & 6: Events, self-promotion, and charades, and LingComm, day 7 & 8: Pitching and final projects.
- LingComm.org Resources page
- How to write a successful pop linguistics book (which doubles as a guide to how to break into pop linguistics writing)
- Practical advice if you want to start a podcast (by superlinguo, which I co-sign as we have a podcast together)
Academic advice
Self-teaching
High school
- Linguistics resources for high school teachers
- Proto-linguistics: 6 ways to do linguistics in high school
- Trying to hack the IB diploma into something vaguely linguistic
Undergrad
- How to look for linguistics undergraduate programs
- How much jargon do you need to know before starting a linguistics undergrad class? (Spoiler: not much!)
- 28 tips for doing better in your intro linguistics course
- How to find a topic for your linguistics paper
- So, your linguistics department has a recruitment challenge (how to increase undergraduate enrollement)
- How to find student-friendly academic linguistics conferences near you
- What is LaTeX and why do linguists love it for typing linguistics symbols?
Grad school
- Should you go to grad school in linguistics? Maybe
- Linguistics grad school advice, part 1: how do you know if you want to get a PhD in linguistics?
- Linguistics grad school advice, part 2: how do you decide which grad schools to go to or apply to for linguistics?
- Do I need to have a linguistics major/undergrad degree to apply for linguistics grad school?
- Lingthusiasm Bonus #21: What’s it really like at academic linguistics conferences?
- PhD/Postdoc tips from Lauren Gawne
- How to become a professor in linguistics
- Lingthusiasm Bonus #15: linguistics grad school advice
Weird Internet Careers
A series on making a living making weird stuff on the internet, as of late 2019.
- Part I - What is a Weird Internet Career?
- Part II - How I Built a Weird Internet Career as an Internet Linguist
- Part III - How to start a Weird Internet Career
- Part IV - How to make money doing a Weird Internet Career
- Part V - What can a Weird Internet Career look like?
- Part VI - Is it too late for me to start my Weird Internet Career?
- Part VII - How to level up your Weird Internet Career
Long list of possible linguistics jobs
Both common and unexpected jobs that people have gotten with a linguistics degree - click for interviews! Also check the linguistics jobs tag for the most recent interviews, since it updates automatically.
- Lexicographer
- Scholarly communications librarian
- Health writer
- Policy analyst
- Science fiction writer
- Book publicist
- ESL Teacher
- Literary Agent
- Speech Pathologist (profile, more resources)
- Translator
- Career Linguist
- Research Assistant (more on RAships)
- Data scientist
- Linguistics podcasters - me and Lauren Gawne featured in Babel Magazine’s Meet the Professionals series
These interviews are by Lauren Gawne at Superlinguo (see also her master list of linguistics jobs interviews):
- Internet linguist (it’s me!)
- Project manager at a language learning tech company
- Language creator
- Data analyst
- Journalist
- Interpreter
- High school teacher
- Humanitarian aid worker
- Editor & copywriter
- Language revitalization program director
- Copywriter & fiction author
- Tour company director
- Computational linguist
- Speech pathologist
- EFL teacher
- Educational development consultant
- Apprentice mechanic
- Radio digital managing editor
- University course coordinator
- Think tank researcher
- Museum curator
- Communications consultant
- Communications professionals
- Accent coach
- Conductor
- Standards engineer
- Translator and business owner
- Freelance editor and writer
- Agency owner and executive editor
- PR consultant
- Journalist/editor
- School linguist
- Lexicographer
- Learning scientist
- Communications specialist
- Product manager
- Software engineer
- Marketing content specialist
- Community outreach coordinator
Looking for a bit of levity in the linguistics job search? Try this satirical linguistics jobs interview about becoming a wug farmer.
I also post or reblog linguistics jobs related articles and resources when I come across them:
- Linguistics and careers in Artificial Intelligence
- How a linguist became a zookeeper
- Video from professional paths for linguists workshop
- Linguists who have become webcomic creators
- Linguists in industry panel video
- Computational linguistics, machine translation (more machine language)
- Linguists in industry panel (primarily tech-focused)
- Working in tech: it’s not just for computational linguists (LSA webinar)
- Letter to a prospective lexicographer
- On naming new products (more on naming)
- Forensic linguistics, more forensic linguistics, and still more
- Professional conlanger
- NASA, user experience testing, and others
- Compilations of resources (and another compilation)
- The four data science skills I didn’t learn in linguistics grad school (and how to learn them)
- A video about speech-language pathology as a linguistics career
General careers resources:
- A twitter thread by Tressie McMillan Cottom on getting entry-level jobs from a social sciences degree (and especially how to do informational interviews)
- From PhD to Life (blog on non-academic careers after a PhD)
- The Professor Is In (blog on academic jobs)
- Ask A Manager on resumes and cover letters
- Get Bullish (posts on side hustles and starting a business)
- The Open Notebook (for science communication and science journalism)
- Stacking the Bricks (for internet product businesses and selling on value)
- The Bello Collective Podcasting 101 (for podcasts)
- Advice on writing a book: for early-stage advice (what kind of publisher should I be aiming for? do I need an agent?), I have found Jane Friedman’s blog helpful; for mid-stage advice (assuming you decided to go with big trade publishers as I did), I’d suggest reading Kate McKean’s Agents and Books newsletter; and for late-stage advice (when you’ve got a book coming out), I recommend Mary Robinette Kowal’s Debut Author lessons.