Research Overview
Explore how language shapes thought, culture and technology
Research in linguistics at UB is active, collaborative and globally connected. Faculty and graduate students study language from many angles, using real data to understand how language works, how it changes and how it shapes human experience.
Linguistics research here is grounded in evidence and driven by curiosity. Students and faculty work with:
- Field research in communities around the world
- Large language datasets and corpora
- Experimental studies of language and cognition
- Computational models and simulations
This approach helps answer both foundational and applied questions about language.
Students and faculty explore questions about how language is structured, used, learned and changed across individuals, communities and technologies.Students and faculty explore a wide range of topics across the field:
Discourse and pragmatics
Study how people create and interpret meaning through context, conversation and social interaction. Research examines how speakers communicate beyond the literal meanings of words and sentences.
Field research
Investigate languages through direct work with speakers and communities. Researchers collect and analyze language data to better understand linguistic structures, document languages and support community-centered research goals.
Historical linguistics
Explore how languages change over time and how languages are historically related. Research can trace changes in sounds, words and grammatical structures while revealing connections among language families.
Natural language processing
Explore how computational methods can be used to analyze, model and process human language. Research combines linguistics, data and technology to investigate language patterns and develop applications such as machine translation, speech recognition, text analysis and conversational AI.
Phonetics and phonology
Examine the sounds of human language and the systems that organize them. Research explores how speech sounds are produced and perceived as well as how languages use sound patterns to distinguish meaning.
Psycholinguistics
Investigate how people understand, produce and learn language. Research examines the cognitive processes that allow us to recognize words, construct sentences, interpret meaning and communicate in real time.
Semantics
Study how languages encode and organize meaning. Research investigates how words and sentences convey meaning and how linguistic structures shape the interpretations people can make.
Sociolinguistics and multilingualism
Examine how language varies across communities, cultures and social contexts. Research explores topics such as language variation, multilingual language use, language contact and the relationship between language and social life.
Syntax
Investigate the principles and patterns that determine how words combine to form sentences. Research compares sentence structures within and across languages to better understand the possibilities and constraints of human language.
Typology
Compare languages to identify patterns in how they are structured and how they vary. Research draws on languages from around the world to investigate which linguistic features are common, rare or connected to one another.
Research with real-world impact
Linguistics research at UB connects scholarship with practical needs, from documenting Indigenous and lesser-studied languages to supporting language learning and advancing technologies such as speech recognition and language processing. This work contributes to linguistic knowledge while supporting the communities and contexts in which languages are used.
Research experience can help you explore your interests, build skills and prepare for graduate study or other career paths. Depending on your program and the opportunities available, students may participate through:
- Independent study and faculty-led projects
- Graduate research assistantships
- Collaborative research groups
- Fieldwork and community-based projects
Interested in joining UB's linguistics research community? Explore the people, programs and opportunities that can help you find your place in the field.
Jodi L. Reiner
Department/Graduate Secretary
Department of Linguistics