Institute of Linguistics (formerly ILES)

The Institute of Linguistics has moved to S205 Elliott Hall, 75 East River Road, Minneapolis MN 55455, and the email address has changed to ling@umn.edu. The Institute's phone and fax numbers remain the same.

The Institute of Linguistics (IoL), a department of the College of Liberal Arts located on the Minneapolis campus of the University of Minnesota, is the academic home of faculty and students who do research and teach in various subfields of linguistics, the scientific study of human language. IoL houses the Academic Program in Linguistics, whose curriculum and undergraduate and graduate degree programs provide a strong foundation of coursework in core areas of theoretical and descriptive linguistics (phonetics/phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics/pragmatics). This foundation provides the basis for specialization in one or more of these areas as well as investigation of topics at the interface of other subfields and specialties, including interdisciplinary fields such as language and cognition, language processing (by humans and by machines), and language acquisition. The program encourages research that bridges the gap between linguistics as a pure science and applications in such areas as, for example, documentation and revitalization of endangered languages, computational linguistics, and neurolinguistics.

Research in IoL strives to contribute to a theory that reveals the principles governing all human languages through analysis and description of particular languages. Research projects funded by the National Science Foundation and other funding sources, including collaborative projects with other units across the university (e.g. the Center for Cognitive Sciences, the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, the Department of Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences, the Institute of Child Development, and the Department of American Indian Studies) form an important focus for faculty and student research.