Linguistics Program

Linguistics at Richmond is an interdisciplinary minor that studies the system of language as a medium of cognition and perception as well as a social institution. Engaging in linguistic analysis enables students to view culture through the lens of language. Language can be studied at multiple levels: phonetics and phonology (sounds), morphology (words), syntax (sentences), and semantics and pragmatics (meaning). Faculty at Richmond investigate each of these levels in courses that take different analytical perspectives: applied linguistics, computational linguistics, generative linguistics, historical linguistics, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, and theoretical linguistics. These courses address a variety of topics, including language change, language and cognition, and language and society (gender, class, race/ethnicity).

Minor Requirements Courses Upcoming Courses

Feature Stories

UR students Leo Barnes, Bonny Bruzos, and Maya Casillas

UR Now: University News

UR scholars have been honored with national awards

Richmond students receive Fulbright, Gilman, and other prestigious scholarships.

Rankings News

University of Richmond Named ‘Best Value College’ by Princeton Review; Ranked as a Top 10 School for Internships

Richmond has once again been named to The Princeton Review’s list of “Best Value Colleges” for 2025. Richmond has been included on this list since 2013.

Five University of Richmond Graduates Receive Fulbright Grants to Teach English Abroad

Five UR graduates have accepted Fulbright grants for the 2025-26 academic year.

UR students plant flowers on the Eco-Corridor

UR Now: University News

University of Richmond receives green honors

The campus has secured a nationally recognized rating for its eco-excellence and achievement as a sustainability leader.

Faculty Highlights

Kissling presents on bilingualism

Elizabeth Kissling, associate professor of Spanish and applied linguistics, presented "Contributions of declarative and procedural memory to early L2 phonological development" at the 15th International Symposium on Bilingualism.

Kissling presents on teaching language concepts

Elizabeth Kissling, associate professor of Spanish and applied linguistics, presented "Teaching grammatical concepts in real life: Fulfilling the promise of concept-based language instruction" at the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) annual conference.

Park publishes paper on improving performance of large language models

Joonsuk Park, associate professor of computer science, published the paper "tRAG: Term-level Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Zero-shot Retrieval" in Proceedings of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL).

Park publishes on boosting QA scoring accuracy

Joonsuk Park, associate professor of computer science, published the paper "Return of EM: Entity-driven Answer Set Expansion for QA Evaluation" in Proceedings of the International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING).