Program Overview

Overview

The Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics (PhD) program at the University of British Columbia is a highly interdisciplinary field that combines research methods from the humanities and the social, natural, and mathematical sciences. Linguistics is the scientific study of human language, and linguists are interested in questions such as the structural properties of languages, language acquisition, language processing in the mind/brain, speech production and perception, and language change over time.

Program Details

• The program covers a broad range of topics, with substantial coverage of syntax, semantics, morphology, phonetics, phonology, and pragmatics.
• The Department of Linguistics has a strong commitment to the study of Languages of the Americas, with particular focus on First Nations Languages of Canada.
• Research areas intersect and overlap considerably, and faculty and students are often simultaneously involved in more than one area.
• The program has a diverse curriculum and research program, with faculty members from many different disciplines and from across the UBC campus, across the country, and across the world.

Admission Information & Requirements

Minimum Academic Requirements

• The Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies establishes the minimum admission requirements common to all applicants, usually a minimum overall average in the B+ range (76% at UBC).
• Each program may set higher academic minimum requirements.

English Language Test

• Applicants from a university outside Canada in which English is not the primary language of instruction must provide results of an English language proficiency examination as part of their application.
• Minimum requirements for the two most common English language proficiency tests:
  • TOEFL: Overall score requirement: 90, Reading: 22, Writing: 21, Speaking: 21, Listening: 22
  • IELTS: Overall score requirement: 6.5, Reading: 6.0, Writing: 6.0, Speaking: 6.0, Listening: 6.0

Prior Degree Requirements

• Applicants to the PhD program are normally required to have a Master’s degree, or at least one year of training at the graduate level.
• In exceptional cases, applicants with only a Bachelor’s degree who have very strong grades may be admitted to the PhD program.

Course Requirements

• Applicants are expected to have done substantive coursework in the areas of linguistics that form the theoretical core of the program: syntax, phonology, phonetics, and semantics.
• Students who lack background in one or two of these areas may still be admitted, but will have to take the relevant undergraduate courses during the first year of their program.

Tuition & Financial Support

Tuition

• Fees for Canadian Citizen / Permanent Resident / Refugee / Diplomat: $5,626.02 per year
• Fees for International students: $9,883.98 per year

Financial Support

• The Department of Linguistics guarantees funding of $30,000 plus the cost of tuition per annum for the first five years of the PhD program to all students accepted to the graduate programs.
• Funding packages are made up of scholarships, research assistantships, and teaching assistantships depending on individual students, year of study, and the financial resources of the department.

Career Outcomes

• UBC’s Department of Linguistics alumni have a longstanding history of individual achievements and collective success.
• Recent graduates have taken positions at UBC Language Sciences, Amazon, Yelp, and many graduates with a PhD in Linguistics have gone on to become postdoctoral fellows, lecturers, and professors at UBC, University of Toronto, McGill, SFU, University of Victoria, University of Ottawa, Yale, University of Singapore, and National Taiwan University.

Enrolment, Duration & Other Stats

• The program has a graduation rate of 76% based on 17 students admitted between 2011 - 2014.
• Based on 8 graduations between 2020 - 2023, the minimum time to completion is 5.12 years and the maximum time is 10.93 years with an average of 7.56 years of study.

Research Supervisors

• Students in research-based programs usually require a faculty member to function as their thesis supervisor.
• Applicants should browse faculty profiles and indicate in their application who they are interested in working with.
• No commitment from a supervisor prior to applying is necessary, but contacting faculty members is encouraged.

Sample Thesis Submissions

• Gradual error-driven learning and typology of Finnic vowel interactions
• Anglocentric standards in universal text and speech processing
• The grammar of Salish reduplication
• Energy as reward: an ecological foundation for the structure of attentional fixation in computational agents during audiovisual speech communication
• Integrating posture control in speech models
• Quantization and quantification: countability and scope of bare nouns in Kaingang and beyond
• Expressing multiplicity in Ktunaxa: groups, sentience, and the structure of number
• Speech postures are postures: towards a unified approach to postural control in gross and fine motor skills
• Towards Afrocentric natural language processing

Related Programs

• Master of Arts in Linguistics (MA)
• Master of Data Science in Computational Linguistics (MDSCL)

Further Information

• Specialization: Linguistics
• Faculty: Faculty of Arts
• Academic Unit: Department of Linguistics
• Program Identifier: VGDPHD-O2
• Classification: Humanities and the arts » Languages and literature » Linguistics, Natural sciences » Computer and information sciences » Artificial intelligence (AI) » Natural language processing