One simple truth about the academic job market in linguistics is that the vibes are bad. This is true now. It is always true. Another truth is that most reasoning about the academic job market is based on vibes. Those "on the market" follow job postings closely; those who are not do not. (Just ask any recently hired assistant professor: they will tell you how happy they are to no longer follow along.) This kind of situation calls out for empirical work. What is actually going on in the academic job market for linguistics, beyond vibes?

In this post, written in collaboration with data scientist Barak Krakauer¹, we bring some numbers to bear on the situation. Our data is based on job postings scraped [by Barak] from linguist list (LL). Our basic question is: what is happening in the market of jobs aimed at linguists? There are different ways one can make this question more precise. We will talk about a few of them. What we find raises many questions of interpretation. We invite your feedback on how to interpret the numbers we find.

The data we were able to access from LL start in 2002, but the 2002 data are sparse. So, we start our study with 2003. It seems reasonable to assume for more recent years that pretty much all academic linguistics jobs in the US are being advertised on LL, so I think we can draw general conclusions about the US based academic job market for linguists from this data. What conclusions we can draw about the situation outside the US is a more complex question, which we discuss below.

A caveat to keep in mind is that jobs posted to LL include both “linguist jobs” and “jobs open to linguists”, borrowing a helpful distinction made by historians.² Historians, who make these amazing annual reports about the state of their profession, account for this (apparently) by hand-coding individual job listings. We did not do this. So, it should be kept in mind that our numbers represent jobs open to linguists and certainly over-represent the more narrow class of linguist jobs.

Final note before we get to the meat of it: the data we used for these analyses are available for download here.

Let's first take a look at total jobs posted on LL over time. Bear in mind that this includes tenured/tenure-track academic jobs, temporary academic teaching positions, jobs in industry, post-doc positions, etc. (It doesn’t include PhD student roles—those are classified by LL as “support”, not “jobs”.) Also bear in mind that academic years and calendar years don't align. We made the decision to code under the calendar year that the academic year starts in, so, concretely, jobs posted July 1, 2024 - June 30, 2025 are coded as 2024. So, the last year we have full data for is 2024, and we have most though not all of the data we will eventually have for 2025.

The obvious take away here is number go down. The downward trajectory starts in 2016. 2016-2018 are lower than 2015 but not historically low. 2019(-2020) starts posting numbers last seen in the financial crisis, plausibly because of the effects of COVID in the second part of that academic year. In 2020, we see a much more major COVID dip, followed by a partial bounce back in 2021 and 2022, and then a HUGE decline, with the 2024(-2025) academic year posting the lowest full-year numbers ever recorded and the 2025(-2026) year almost guaranteed to ultimately come in even lower. The top-level data bear out the vibes. The number of jobs on linguist list is, right now, historically bad.

Two possible explanations for our topline findings are: (1) the jobs still exist, but they are not being posted on LL, or (2) the jobs don’t exist. In scenario 1, it could be for instance that corporate jobs of various sorts were advertised on LL at some point, but companies moved away from LL job posting in favor of some other venue. Scenario 1 is less likely if the “missing” jobs are academic jobs, in view of our baseline assumption that LL remains just as popular as it was 10 years ago in terms of venues to advertise jobs in academia. To assess this, then, we should look at which types of job ads, specifically, are in decline since 2015. What we see is that jobs in academia are leading the post-2015 job collapse, including both professor jobs and non-TT “stepping stone” roles such as lecturer and instructor.³

While the greatest numerical decline here is in assistant professor postings, an even greater percentage decline is seen in lecturer jobs (64%) and instructor jobs (86%). Post-doc positions are down, but by much less, both in absolute and in relative terms. There are also declines in the number of positions posted with industry titles like “consultant” or “programmer”, but the overall number of such jobs is very small. The trend is coming not from these jobs but from the utter bloodbath in academia.

Jobs advertised on LL are located predominantly in the US, with the next five most common locations (in the last ten years) being Germany, the UK, Canada, and Hong Kong. Here are the top 20 locations for the past 10 years of data:

It is not surprising that US-based jobs dominate LL listings, because (a) the US has a larger higher ed sector than various smaller countries, and (b) LL, specifically, is US-based. So that is to be kept in mind in contextualizing everything else that can be taken from this data: the trend lines are overwhelmingly driven by US trend lines (as we will see more below), and there are clearly job markets for linguists around the world that are not captured by the data here because the relevant jobs were never posted to LL.

Breaking out the overall postings numbers by country, we see that the current bad market, as seen on LL, is mostly [in numerical terms] but not entirely a US phenomenon. Over the entire data set, the top five countries are the USA, Germany, the UK, Canada, and the Netherlands. (In more recent years, #5 is Hong Kong. See below.) All of these show significant recent declines, though the exact pattern looks different in different countries. (Notably, Germany looks different from the rest.)

We now look at that pattern more closely in our top five locations (top five in the last 10 years). Our goal here is to understand what parts of the change we see come from permanent/tenure-track jobs vs. those with less stability. For this purpose we distinguish a class of jobs we call “professor rank” jobs. These are those that include the word professor in the title or open rank. In the US, contrary to narratives of “adjunctification”, we find that professor rank jobs are actually doing about on par with non-prof-rank jobs, and in the last three full years surpassed them in frequency:

One possible explanation for this is that most of the adjunctification of US higher ed happened well before the time period in question. Another possible explanation is that professor rank jobs are being advertised on LL at higher rates than non-prof-rank jobs are, potentially due to different rules about how different sorts of jobs must be publicized.

Looking now to Germany, we see much clearer division between prof-rank and non-prof rank jobs, a fact that will surprise no one familiar with the German system. One could make the case that there is still a decline here, but it is less steep than in some other countries. It looks like 2019 was a pretty good year for the job market in Germany.

Throughout our analysis we treated the title “lecturer” in the UK as a professor rank job (binned above with assistant professor, as noted in the footnote). In the graph below we separate professor rank jobs, including lecturers, vs. all other positions in the UK. Things are not going well in the UK basically for any type of job advertised to linguists, as far as we can tell:

The Canada situation is the mirror image of Germany in that we find more professor jobs and fewer jobs of other types. Again, it is possible that the non-prof-rank jobs are less likely to be posted internationally i.e. on linguist list. (Canadians, what do you think?) The numbers are small but the two types of jobs seems to be following the same trend line.

Last, in Hong Kong, we see a huge spike in professor-rank hiring in 2021 and continuing into 2022. Note that Hong Kong was not in the top five locations over our overall time span, but came in #5 specifically in the last 10 years (displacing the Netherlands).

Our data show a major decline in the market of academic jobs advertised to linguists over the past decade. One might conclude from this that fewer people are being hired as linguists in academia. Two obvious questions this raises are: Is this really happening? If so, why?

My sense is that, for the US, it probably is happening. Going into this is the assumption that, in the US, LL remains just as popular as ever as a way to advertise academic jobs to linguists. If fewer academic jobs are being advertised to linguists on LL, the simplest hypothesis is that fewer academic jobs open to linguists exist.

So if that’s so, why? We see over this period a broader trend away from TT hiring, as attested for instance by the numbers from the AAUP [American Association of University Professors] that show an overall reduction in TT headcount of almost 5% since 2015. The AAUP is counting assistant professors, whereas we are counting job ads, so it could be that our data portend a steeper decline to come in the years ahead in the AAUP numbers. It is also possible that there is something specific to our discipline, or to the broader funding landscape for social science or humanities, that helps to explain the hiring patterns we are seeing. One note here is that our discipline is probably different from History in that linguists are often hired in departments that don’t have “linguistics” in the title.⁴ Our fate as a discipline is bound up with that of others. Before we jump to a linguistics-specific interpretation of these data, we need to compare our data to that of other disciplines. We invite suggestions about data sources to use for that.

I am less sure how to interpret the numbers for non-US job markets and I very much invite feedback on our findings from those knowledgeable about non-US markets. How do candidates learn about job openings in your country? How much of the academic job market in your country do you think is captured by LL? Are there larger trends in higher ed in your country that speak to the numbers we see, or something specific in terms of the status of linguistics?

Corrections: I previously incorrectly stated that LL job postings started in 2002. Thanks to Andrew Carnie for pointing out the error.