This track provides a solid foundation in contemporary linguistic research, equipping students for careers in research, teaching, and language-related fields. All these fields of employment share an interest in people with highly developed skills in the analysis and use of spoken or written language. It can involve looking at how languages change over time (historical linguistics); how language varies from situation to situation, group to group, and place to place (sociolinguistics, dialectology); how people use language in context (pragmatics, discourse analysis); how to model aspects of language (computational linguistics); how people acquire or learn language (language acquisition); and how people process language (psycholinguistics, experimental linguistics). Linguists study engineering abroad the forms that various languages take in their own context and how the meanings of words and phrases in a given language develop over time.