Welcome to Gaia! ::

I wonder if anyone ever goes in this subforum, but I'll give it a shot...

Linguistics students - what are the programs for linguistics in your university / college? How are they structured, what kind of different branches are there? I'm very curious to as how this works in other places, as there are so many ways to teach such a field.

In my university department of linguistics is branched into a structural linguistics program and a generative linguistics program, and students must choose one of them before starting. I've chosen the structural program. Some courses (like introduction to linguistics) are shared to both programs, and both aspects are taught in them, and also, each student must participate in one course of the other program.

The main difference is that while in the generative program the same issues are taught separately, e.g, courses on morphology, phonology, grammar and so forth and also courses also related to the cognitive/psychological/social sides of language, in my program it is more language specific.

This means each student chooses a group of languages they'd like to focus on (Indo-European, Semitic, etc.) and learn, probably, similar topics (except for sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics which are only covered in shared courses), only by getting there through working with languages, which means a student must take an intensive course in an ancient language of the chosen group (for Indo-European, which is what I'm doing, that would be Latin, Ancient Greek or Sanskrit) and learn the structural elements, syntax and grammar of three related languages, and of one that's unrelated, in hopes to cover a variety of how languages and language work.

Personally, sometimes I think it is pretty necessary to merge those two disciplines further.

How does it work in your programs?