History
When the Berkeley Linguistics Department was founded in 1901, it was the first Department of Linguistics in the Western Hemisphere. It granted the first American Ph.D. in Linguistics in 1904, to Pliny Earle Goddard; his dissertation The Morphology of the Hupa Language is still used by specialists in the languages of northwest California. The department lasted 10 years before being folded into the Department of Anthropology by the great A. L. Kroeber, who held that linguistic research, which then consisted in great part of field linguistics training, should be done in an anthropology department. The department was re-constituted in 1953 by the distinguished Sanskrit and Dravidian scholar Murray B. Emeneau, who also established the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages. Field linguistics in and beyond California thrived under the leadership of Emeneau and, later, Mary Haas, a leading scholar of both American Indian and Asian languages. While field linguistics has continued to be a mainstay, the department has over the decades acquired other areas of expertise as well, and is currently one of the most diverse departments of Linguistics in the country, with specialites in phonetics, phonology, syntax, semantics, cognitive linguistics, and historical linguistics; areal specialties, in addition to American Indian languages, include the languages of Africa, Southeast Asia, Australia and the Caucasus. There are at present 14 faculty and 5 retired professors associated with the department, as well as a number of distinguished linguists in other departments who are affiliated with Linguistics. With over 50 graduate students in progress toward the M.A. and Ph.D. degrees, Berkeley linguists remain committed to the empirical, historical, and theoretical study of linguistic structure within a broad linguistic, cultural, and cognitive context.