What does a linguist do?

Tell people you are a linguist and the next question is usually "So how many languages do you speak?" The Linguistic Society of America, the professional society for linguists in the US, answers it on its own website: "Linguistics is actually not about learning to speak lots of languages (although some of our members do). Rather, linguistics is the scientific study of language."

A careers brochure the society publishes, written by the linguists Monica Macaulay and Kristen Syrett, puts it more directly: the work of a linguist "involves learning about Language, rather than learning different languages." The capital L is theirs: they mean language in general, not any particular one.

Linguist or translator?

The confusion runs deep enough to reach federal data. O*NET, the Labor Department's database of occupations, has no occupation called linguist. The word shows up in one place: as a job title that workers reported under interpreters and translators.

Translation is a real career for linguists, but a separate skill. The Linguistic Society's page on the profession says that "with additional training, translation and interpretation are other potential careers for linguists."

What linguists study

These are the main subfields. The definitions follow the University of Georgia's linguistics department, which has a research page for each.

Historical linguistics is the subfield behind family trees of languages, and behind the finding that some languages, called language isolates, have no demonstrable relatives at all.

Where linguists work

The Linguistic Society's profession page lists jobs that include lexicographer ("you would help write and edit dictionaries for online and print publication"), artificial intelligence development, text-to-speech, machine translation, communications intelligence and cryptanalysis, forensic linguistics for law enforcement, language documentation, language revitalization and speech pathology.

The federal government hires linguists too. The society's brochure lists the Foreign Service, the National Security Agency, the CIA, the Department of Defense and the Department of Education among the federal agencies that hire linguists. It also notes that law enforcement agencies, law firms and the courts hire linguists for forensic work.

Universities employ linguists as researchers and teachers, and some of that research is fieldwork with communities whose languages have few speakers left. The Endangered Languages Documentation Programme, founded in 2002 with a donation from the Arcadia fund to SOAS University of London and based since 2021 at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, says it has funded more than 500 documentation projects. (For how many languages there are to document, see how many languages are there in the world.)

A famous case: the Unabomber's proverb

The best-known use of linguistic evidence in an American criminal case involves a proverb. The Unabomber's manifesto used the phrase "You can't eat your cake and have it, too," the reverse of the usual "You can't have your cake and eat it, too."

James R. Fitzgerald, a longtime FBI analyst, told The Washington Times in 2006 that he first took it for a mistake, then found the same order in other letters by Ted Kaczynski and learned it was the older form of the proverb. "It was one of the big clues that allowed us to make the rest of the comparison and submit a report to the judge who signed off on a search warrant," he said. Kaczynski was arrested at his cabin on April 3, 1996.

Who noticed the phrase first is disputed. The linguist Ben Zimmer, writing on the blog Language Log, credited Kaczynski's brother David, who had recognized the manifesto's language and gone to the FBI. Fitzgerald replied in an email that Zimmer published: David had pointed investigators to another phrase, "cool-headed logicians," but never mentioned the cake proverb, and Fitzgerald said he was the first to spot it.

What the pay data says

Because there is no federal category for linguists, there is no official linguist salary. The two closest Bureau of Labor Statistics categories give a rough range.

BLS counted 73,900 interpreter and translator jobs in 2025 and projects about 6,000 openings a year. The postsecondary figure covers professors in every field, so it says little about linguistics departments on their own.

How people become linguists

Most start with a bachelor's degree in linguistics. The Linguistic Society's brochure says students are usually required to take an introductory course and courses in the core theoretical areas, and may be required or encouraged to know at least one language besides English.

According to the Humanities Indicators project of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, about 167 departments at US colleges and universities were awarding linguistics degrees as of fall 2023. In the 2022 to 2023 academic year they awarded an average of 20 bachelor's degrees per department, with a median of 14.