The department of Linguistics at Banaras Hindu University was established in 1972 and was peopled jointly by Sanskrit, Hindi and English departments. In the beginning, the department offered courses only in Historical and Comparative Linguistics and Indo-European Linguistics. Presently, the department has five faculty members and offers courses in all the major areas in Linguistics, including Syntax, Semantics, Pragmatics, Computational Linguistics, Natural Language Processing, and Language Technology. The department also offers BA (Honors) course in Linguistics. The Department is running a UGC Major Research Project (Project). The department has recently successfully hosted the 28th All India Conference of Linguists (AICL-28). In the academic session 2005-2007, the department has around 100 students including PhD scholars. The department publishes a research journal Bhashacintan.The department proposes to offer MPhil in Applied Linguistics and PG Diploma in Language Technology (they are at the different levels of conceptualization/realization) from session 2007.