Dear Kane:

Hello! I'm writing on behalf of Ask A Linguistics Tutor in response to your 2/03/01 question about becoming a linguist.

First of all, we're so glad that you're thinking about becoming a linguist! Linguistics is a very exciting field and there's so many things to learn about languages. If you want to be a linguist, you can either go to school for a very long time and become a professor at a university. That's what I'm going to do. Otherwise, you can graduate from college with a major in linguistics and work for a corporation. A lot of internet companies are looking for linguists to help them work with computers.

So I'll tell you about both options but I'll start by talking about being a professor of linguistics.

1. The best place to become a linguist depends on what subfield of linguistics you want to work in. Some top colleges for linguistics are MIT (in the subfield called syntax) and Berkeley, but almost all colleges have a linguistics department and they are all good for teaching the basics about linguistics.
2. The starting salary for professors is kind of low, you can start as an assistant professor between $30,000 and $45,000 a year.
3. There is room for advancement because you can become an associate professor or get tenure, which means that your job as a professor is secure and you get lots more money (as much as $65,000-$95,000, depending on how famous you are).
4. The benefits are that you usually only have to teach classes for nine months out of the year, but most linguists still come into work during the summer. Another benefit is that if you study particular languages, the government might pay you to travel to different countries. You can also travel when you present papers you write at conferences.
5. The university you work for will offer you a retirement package when you retire, and you get the title of "emeritus." You can often still publish books and papers and make money from that. Though, to be honest, you won't be earning much money from Linguistics books; there's a very limited market.
6. To become a professor, you have to go to college for 4 years (and major in linguistics, if you can, but that's not possible everywhere) and then you usually have to get your doctorate in linguistics. Depending on which school you go to for your doctorate, it can take anywhere from 4 to 8 years.'
7. You can become a professor just by studying linguistics and publishing papers on interesting topics in linguistics.
8. Once you get your doctorate from a school, you publish a big paper called a dissertation, and you go around to interviews. At a lot of these interviews, you have to present a paper in front of people, much like a book report at school. Sometimes people ask questions about the work you've done and you have to give good answers to those. If they're impressed with the work you do and how well you present your paper, they'll give you a job.
9. An average work week varies a lot every semester. Some professors teach only one class a semester, some teach three or four. On top of those classes, many professors are editors of linguistics journals and work as advisors to students getting their degrees. Professors are also supposed to do research and publish books and papers while they're teaching. So they're often very busy! Even though they work a lot, though, they can take work home and sleep in when they don't have a class to teach. But they usually work more than 40 hours a week.'
10. Again, professors need to teach classes (usually two or three) and are supposed to publish a journal article or a book chapter about once a year.'

May 30, 2000

No Longer Just Eggheads, Linguists Leap to the Net

By DANIEL GOLDEN

Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Near Harvard Square, in the cramped, sweltering office of Lexeme nc., five former graduate students in linguistics can't stop laughing.

They've just come across a pun in their research – someone describing a delicatessen as "unforgetabagel." Beneath the hilarity, they're also delighted to have abandoned academic wheel-spinning for the practical challenges -- and potential windfalls -- of an Internet start-up.

"It's like you're a biologist studying frogs. Then somebody who's building a big jumping car comes to you and says, 'You know about jumping things. I need your help,' " says Lexeme's Eric Groat.

Traditionally, a linguistics degree has been among the least marketable of academic credentials. Jobs, when they were available, paid about $35,000 a year on the high end, usually in academia. But now dozens of technology start-ups are commercializing linguistics research, and competing to hire the relatively small pool of specialists on the topic, which isn't even taught at many U.S. universities.

Suddenly, linguists have their pick of jobs as lexicographers, "knowledge engineers" and "vocabulary-resource managers." For those with doctorates, the typical starting salary is around $60,000, plus some stock. More highly trained talent is drawing more than $100,000.

Mr. Groat received his doctorate from Harvard in 1998. But the 35-year-old couldn't land a tenure-track position in the Northeast, where he preferred to live. He taught for a year at the City University of New York and then at Harvard's extension school, his career seemingly stalled. Then this spring, Mr. Groat tripled his income by joining closely held Lexeme, which counts 15 with doctorates in linguistics among its 30 employees. They're building a sophisticated database -- including neologisms like "unforgetabagel" -- to help e-commerce customers navigate the Web.

Linguistics experts help e-businesses improve customer service by building so-called natural-language processing systems that can respond meaningfully to requests for help or information. With linguists developing the database or "lexicon," a system can distinguish between multiple meanings of words, relate groups of words by concept, and narrow the scope of a search by asking questions of the site visitor.

For instance, an online customer asking about shaving products might be asked whether he needs razors, blades or shaving cream before being directed to the appropriate Web site. As the Internet grows, such systems offer an alternative to the keyword searches done by conventional search engines, which can turn up hundreds of irrelevant responses.

To gain a recruiting edge, some employers are resorting to underwriting academic conferences, adding linguistics professors to their advisory boards, and holding pizza parties in university lounges. Or they make financial contributions to the Linguist List, the premier job-referral Web site in the field, where postings are running nearly double over last year.

"Is there a demand? You bet there is," says Stanley Peters, chairman of linguistics at Stanford University. "Is there a supply? Heck no. The supply is extremely limited." Linguists aren't accustomed to being wooed. A 1997 survey by the Modern Languages Association showed that only 28.4% of new Ph.D.s in linguistics found tenure-track positions, and only 52.5% received full-time teaching appointments -- worse than in such fields as English, classics and foreign languages. Nearly a fourth of the linguistics Ph.D.s were either unemployed or looking for a job.

And until recently, only a handful of companies hired any linguists at all, Microsoft Corp. the most prominent. Its linguists helped develop the grammar-checking function for Windows software. As the Internet becomes increasingly global and multilingual, they are now trying to improve the quality of automated translation.

"When I came here in 1992, the attitude was, 'You're here for life, there's nowhere else to go,' " says Bill Dolan, a Microsoft researcher and linguistics Ph.D. from UCLA. "That's no longer true by a long shot."

Part of the problem: For decades, linguistics researchers in academia and government labs labored to create a computer with a human level of understanding of language. With that goal so elusive, some in the field have shifted to making systems that understand and converse within limited domains, such as finance or technology. In other words, commercially viable.

The heavily visited Ask Jeeves Inc. site (www.askjeeves.com) has 10 linguists among its 600 employees. And the Emeryville, Calif., firm is trying to hire more. Smaller natural-language processing firms lean more heavily on linguists. Thirteen of 18 technical employees at closely held InQuizit Technologies Inc. in Santa Monica, Calif., hold linguistics doctorates or master's degrees. Ten of the 30 employees at closely held Cymfony Inc. in suburban Buffalo, N.Y., have linguistics Ph.D.s, including David Sanderson.

After receiving his doctorate in 1995 from the University of Toronto, Mr. Sanderson bounced from translating hockey news into French for a Stanley Cup Web site to teaching English as a second language, while his wife's insurance job paid most of the bills. Then he applied for a Cymfony opening posted on the Linguist List. He started working there a month ago, doubling his income, and plans to buy a house and car this summer.

The price is right, for both sides. What may seem a pittance in the New Economy amounts to a fortune for the long-suffering scholar. "We can go out and get linguists, sometimes with a master's education, for $40,000 to $45,000," says Michael Murphy, chief operating officer of Answerfriend.com in Los Angeles, where half of the 24-member technical staff have advanced degrees in linguistics. "They think they've died and gone to heaven. They're underpriced. Don't tell anybody."

Computational linguists -- who have a hybrid background in linguistics and computer science -- command the highest salaries: $80,000 to $130,000, and usually have an advanced degree. "I counsel a lot of linguistics graduate students," says Kent Clizbe, a former vice consul of the US Embassy in Malta who is now a headhunter specializing in recruiting linguists. "I tell them, 'You did your dissertation specializing in Cherokee semantics. Great. Now get as much of a computer background as you can.' "

Closely held AnswerLogic Inc., which is backed by Internet incubator CMGI Inc., is hiring and training what it calls "language lovers" -- recent college graduates with bachelors' degrees in linguistics or related fields. At $30,000 a year plus stock options, they're cheaper than Ph.D.s, and the supply is larger. The Washington, D.C., firm uses natural-language processing to automate customer support for technology companies.

The widespread emigration to business has shaken some colleges. Steven Chang, a graduate student in phonetics at the University of California at Berkeley, recently took a job at closely held BeVocal Inc., a Santa Clara voice portal that provides automated traffic and weather reports, news and stock quotes when subscribers dial its toll-free number.