The Department's mission is to create and promulgate knowledge about human language: how it may be analyzed systematically, how it is naturally acquired, how it is accessed under controlled conditions, and how it is used in everyday life. The Department has a strong theoretical and experimental foundation with regard to all subcomponents of language. Because of the centrality of the study of human language to many other fields of inquiry and the need to enhance the research and teaching mission of the University of Arizona as a whole, we maintain strong connections to other units on campus, such as the Interdisciplinary Programs in American Indian Studies (AIS), Cognitive Science (CogSci), and Second Language Acquisition and Teaching (SLAT), in addition to the Department of Anthropology, the Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, the Department of Psychology, and the various departments and units involved in research on and teaching of specific languages. We also teach and do research on the languages of the Tohono O'odham, Yaqui, and Navajo Nations, because of both their intrinsic interests, and their importance as the native/heritage languages of indigenous people of Arizona.
