The Master’s programme in Linguistic Theory and Language Description trains students in methods of linguistic analysis and the interdisciplinary study of language and language documentation. With a focus on sociolinguistics and typologically informed language description, students gain hands-on linguistic research experience.
The programme is taught by members of HSE’s School of Linguistics in Moscow, which conducts a wide range of research activities, including fieldwork with minority languages, field anthropology, typology, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and Russian sign language. Some of these activities are pursued in cooperation with the Laboratory of Language Convergence and the Center for Language and Brain. It is one of the few master’s programmes in theoretical linguistics that includes a strong interdisciplinary perspective, including acoustic phonetics and variationist sociolinguistics.