Carnegie Mellon University's Department of Languages, Cultures & Applied Linguistics offers a one-year, intensive Master of Arts in Applied Linguistics & Second Language Acquisition program. This program equips both U.S. and international students for diverse careers in language education and research. Students can specialize in language learning research and teaching across various languages, including Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Spanish and English.

The M.A. in TESOL and Applied Linguistics prepares teachers to work with adult learners of English in a wide range of ESL and EFL settings. The program is rooted in the intimate connection between research and practice in language learning and teaching. It melds linguistic, pedagogical, and contextual dimensions of classroom language learning, and emphasizes informed professionalism in the teacher's work.

Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field that addresses the use of computers to process or produce human language. Linguistics contributes to this field an understanding of the special properties of language data, and also provides theories and descriptions of language structure and use. Computational linguistics is largely an applied discipline concerned with practical problems. Typical applications include natural language processing, machine translation (translating from one language to another), speech synthesis, speech production, information retrieval (finding relevant documents or parts of documents in large collections of texts), cognitive modeling, and, in general, almost anything dealing with natural language interfaces.