The Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara stands at the forefront of several converging trends in the field of linguistics, thanks to a series of key decisions made when the department was founded in 1989. UCSB Linguistics was created to realize a vision of linguistics as a field that would seek explanations for language as a fundamental human activity, through an understanding of how languages are used by their speakers. From the beginning, the department committed itself to maintaining a sharp focus on the theoretical and methodological tools that would be needed to realize this vision, and to developing a broad empirical base for the work via a typologically diverse sampling of the world’s languages. As more and more researchers across all fields of linguistics are seeking well-motivated explanations and firmly grounded empirical evidence for claims about the nature of language, UCSB’s longstanding leadership in this enterprise puts the department at the cutting edge of linguistic scholarship, developing ideas and methods that are critical for moving the field of linguistics into a new era.