Linguists

Employers

While private companies and federal government agencies employ some linguists, most linguists conduct their work at colleges and universities. In fact, colleges and universities employ more linguists than all other employers combined. In addition, the Linguistic Society of America reports that opportunities in the private sector include foreign-language advertising and multicultural marketing support (for international corporations), text-to-speech development (performed by technology firms such as Apple, Amazon, and Google), machine translation, artificial intelligence development, and linguistic advocacy (documenting endangered languages). Those without doctoral degrees can find work with community colleges and special programs offering English as a second language courses.

Some linguists work as interpreters and translators, teachers of English as a Second Language, lexicographers, technical writers, journalists, and teachers of foreign languages. 

More linguists are finding jobs outside of academia as computational linguists for dot-com companies. They build databases and lexicons and develop language-processing systems for Web sites to make it easier for people to navigate and get more precise answers to requests for information.

Starting Out

Professors often keep students aware of openings for graduate teaching assistantships and of campus recruiting visits by potential employers. In graduate school, students can find work tutoring undergraduate linguistics classes or assisting professors in their research or classroom work. Such experience is very important when it's time to look for employment.

Linguists interested in working for the federal government should look for civil service announcements and apply to the federal agency for which they want to work. The armed forces also sponsor the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center for military personnel. Admittance is based on scores from the Defense Language Aptitude Battery Test. Linguists who are attracted to missionary work should contact the representatives of the mission branch of their church or religious denomination.