Linguistics (Ph.D.)

You will experience a unique range and depth of Harvard’s offerings in related fields, especially ancient and modern languages and the growing Mind Brain Behavior Initiative.

You will have the flexibility to customize your program to prepare you for post-graduate success in an academic or non-academic role. You can access a wide range of Harvard resources including the Widener Library, which contains a matchless linguistic and philological collection supplemented by a special non-circulating collection accessible only to linguistics students and faculty.

Examples of theses and dissertations by graduates include “An Experimental Pragmatic Investigation of Depictive Co-Speech Gestures,” “Interpreting Questions with Non-Exhaustive Answers,” “Nominal Arguments and Language Variation,” and “Phrasing is Key: The Syntax and Prosody of Focus in Georgian.”

Graduates of the program have secured academic positions at Rutgers University, University of California, Berkeley, University of Vienna, and the University of Hawaii. Others hold jobs with companies such as Amazon, Google, and Grammarly.

Entry Requirements Applicants must achieve an SAT score in the range of 1500–1600 to be considered for this program. English language requirements are assessed on a case-by-case basis.