Linguistics at Yale

While the present departmental structure has only been in place since 1961, there is a long and distinguished history of teaching and research in linguistics at the University. The below timeline integrates important moments in the history of the discipline and contributions from Yale students and faculty. You can also learn more on the department's web site.

  

 

“...to call the whole science [of linguistics] and longer ‘comparative philology’ is not less inappropriate than to call the science of zoology ‘comparative anatomy’ or botanical science the ‘comparison of plants’.”

—William Dwight Whitney, Language and the Study of Language
(New York: C. Scribner & company, 1867),  p.241

This quote dates from a time when linguistics (“the science of language”) was moving from ad hoc comparison of individual words to something much more like historical linguistics today: the study of language change, the universals and differences among the languages of the world, and how they got that way.

  

Featured Titles

Some helps for the Indians: A catechism

by Rev. Abraham Pierson

This is the only book that presents the Quinnipiac language – the language of what is now New Haven and surrounds – in any detail. It was composed by Abraham Pierson and several Quinnipiac people in the 1650s.

Access

Language and the study of language. Twelve lectures on the principles of linguistic science

by William Dwight Whitney

This is the textbook of the first linguistics course taught at Yale, and probably the first taught under the name of linguistics in the USA. In some ways it is surprisingly modern.

Access

Sentence connection. Illustrated chiefly from Livy.

by Irene Nye, PhD '12

Irene Nye, PhD 1912, is plausibly the first dissertation on a subject that would be part of the contemporary discipline of linguistics. Nye is also the first woman to earn a PhD in Linguistics from Yale.

Access

Phonology in the twentieth century: Theories of rules and theories of representations

by Stephen R. Anderson

For many years, Yale linguistics was at the center of linguistics in the USA. Anderson’s study talks about the key developments in the study of sound systems and the key thinkers that drove those ideas, many of whom were at Yale.

Access

Prev