The MA in Linguistics programme of the Department is a 2-year (4 semesters) regular programme. Since 2023-24, the Department has revised its curriculum as per the the NEP 2020.
The pedagogical philosophy of the Department is to strive to inculcate in students scientific temper and critical thinking. In particular, the MA syllabus is designed in a way to enable the students to observe linguistic phenomena, draw generalizations from their observations and attempt to theorize them. The courses in the MA (Linguistics) programme of our Department reflect this vision.
The thrust of the Department is to train the students to achieve transferrable reasoning skills and try to impart capabilities of transdisciplinary thinking. With this focus, the MA (Linguistics) programme of our Department includes courses in research methodology and transdisciplinary concepts.
Apart from these, the Department offers a wide range of elective courses for the students to select from. There are also ability enhancement courses which introduce to the students software training in language analysis & documentation, transcription skills and tools for quantitative analysis. The mandatory and the elective courses together have a balanced thrust on the theoretical Linguistics, incorporating current trends in the research field, as well as on applications of Linguistics in the areas such as translation and human-machine interaction.
The distinctive feature of the MA programme of our Department is its focus on the language analysis and field work, which is clearly projected in the form of a Field Methods course, two Research Project courses in the Programme. As part of the Field Methods course, the MA students in their 3rd semester, learn to collect the data of a language not known to them from the speakers of that language. The students analyse various aspects of lesser-known, low-resource Indian languages and write a dissertation based on the findings of their linguistic analysis as part of the research project in semester 3. They also write another dissertation as part of their their last semester. Through these two dissertations, the MA students are trained towards conducting independent research in Linguistics.
In nearly all the course in the MA programme, the students are encouraged and trained to look closely into and analyse their native languages. They work in groups and also make several presentations in their classes.
The detailed Syllabus of Sem I and II can be perused here.
For the details of the Admission procedure, go to the Admissions page.