language offerings!

College Search & Selection
1

<p>Does anyone know of any liberal arts colleges that offer a wide selection of languages? I know that most have French/Spanish/Japanese, etc., but I was wondering if there were any with programs in Yiddish, Farsi, Bengali, and the like. </p>

<p>I know that even small schools renowned for their language departments, such as Middlebury, only offer those languages students are most likely to study. </p>

<p>Is it necessary to go to a larger university to get the kind of diverse offerings I'm looking for? Do small schools not have these programs because they don't have the student interest/financial means to support them?</p>

2

<p>You correctly answered your own question.</p>

3

<p>If you intend to study obscure languages, then national universities are the best way to go. Be sure to consult course catalogs before you apply, just to be sure.</p>

4

<p>If you really, really want an LAC, I know that Vassar offers some obscure languages, but many are self-study/tutorial. There might be other schools like this.</p>

5

<p>I looked into a lot of this when I was applying a while ago. (I ran into the same issue with Middlebury.)</p>

<p>Harvard offers a lot of obscure languages. So does Indiana University-Bloomington, if I recall correctly*, as well as the University of Chicago. A lot of colleges will have a list on their site of all languages offered, if you search for that. It does depend on how obscure you want, of course: more schools will offer Swedish that Haitian Creole; more will offer Hebrew than Yiddish, etc. </p>

<p>*Yep, just checked their website: 'There are nearly 40 foreign languages offered at IU, from Chinese to Navajo to Arabic, and we teach languages that are not taught anywhere else in the United States, such as Romanian and Uzbek.'</p>

<p>In my opinion, it's risky searching for schools on the basis of their language offerings. Far better to find schools that you look and then check to see what languages are offered. At many colleges, you'll probably have the option of doing independent study in a language as long as there's a professor who knows it.</p>

6

<p>If you want a variety of languages, you aren't going to be able to find that at many LACs. Even Middlebury's variety pales in comparison to some of the larger private schools (Middlebury is better known for its summer intensive language schools).</p>

<p>Departments</a> & Programs
Language</a> Schools</p>

<p>Now compare that with, say, Stanford:</p>

<p>Stanford</a> Language Center:About the Center
[url=<a href="http://www.stanford.edu/dept/SLP/index.html%5DSpecial"&gt;http://www.stanford.edu/dept/SLP/index.html]Special&lt;/a> Language Program: Home<a href="There%20are%20even%20more,%20but%20the%20link%20to%20the%20full%20list%20of%20course%20offerings%20is%20broken">/url</a></p>

<p>Thus, if you want to go to an LAC but take a bunch of languages that few people in the US can even pronounce, you'd be best off going to a school where you can cross-register with a larger research university. With size come languages. That's just how language programs work.</p>

<p>Further, if you can cross-register with a school that pours many of its financial resources into its language programs (such as Stanford, Princeton, Yale, and so on), there's often a "request-a-language" feature in which they will find an instructor to teach you the language. Yale's tutorial system of language learning is especially unique.</p>

7

<p>Something pigasus could also consider is a college consortium, e.g., the Claremont Colleges or the Quaker Consortium. That way you have an LAC environment with the course offerings of several colleges. (I don't have anything to say about these particular colleges, except that UPenn should offer a lot of languages.)</p>

<p>I agree with kyledavid, though. In almost every case, you're going to be better off going to a medium-large university (private or public) as far as language offerings are concerned.</p>

8

<p>One of the biggest and best</p>

<p>The</a> University of Wisconsin-Madison Language Institute</p>

9

<p>Although it's large research university, I think you'd find that the college at the University of Chicago is very similar to a liberal arts college. I looked through our course offerings and found a lot of cool languages:</p>

<p>Akkadian, Albanian, American Sign Language, Arabic, Aramaic, Armenian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Bengali, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, Catalan, Chinese, Czech, Egyptian, Ethiopic, French, German, Ge'ez, Georgian, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hittite, Italian, Japanese, Kazakh, K'iche' Maya, Korean, Latin, Macedonian, Malayalam, Marathi, Nahuatl, Norwegian, Pali, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Sanskrit, Spanish, Sumerian, Swahili, Tamil, Telegu, Tibetan, Turkish, Ugaritic, Urdu, Uzbek, Yiddish</p>

<p>There are probably a lot more that I missed. You should look at the course offerings yourself at University</a> of Chicago Time Schedules or Courses</a> & Programs of Study.</p>

10

<p>Ohio State offers Arabic, ASL, Bulgarian, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latin, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Turkish, Ukranian, Urdu, Uzbek, Yiddish, and Zulu. The</a> Foreign Language Center. I took Swahili and really enjoyed it.</p>

<p>I think generally bigger universities are a good choice for people interested in languages, because they can afford to have enough professors to offer classes in all those languages every semester. Smaller schools might only offer them once a year, or one class each semester. Or they might offer them as small choices under Linguistics.</p>

11

<p>OP, my D, a HS junior, is in a similar situation: she much prefers the intimate environment of LACs, but she's a bit of a language freak---Latin, Ancient Greek, French, starting Portuguese this fall and would like to add Hindi at some point in the future. Problem: very few LACs offer Portuguese, and none that I know of offer Hindi (even though it's the fourth or fifth most widely spoken language in the world). Lots of great research universities do: all the Ivies, Chicago, Stanford, Michigan,Wisconsin. But all these are "too big" in D's opinion.</p>

<p>Solution: look at LACs that are in consortium with large universities.</p>

<p>1) Haverford, Bryn Mawr, Swarthmore, and Penn comprise the "Quaker consortium." Students at any of the three LACs can take unlimited classes at the other LACs (logistically easy between Haverford & Bryn Mawr which are only a mile apart, a little more complicated bureaucratically and logistically with Swarthmore which is 25 minutes away). In addition, students at the LACs can take any class at Penn not offered at the LACs, which includes "less commonly taught languages." Penn has great language programs.</p>

<p>2) Students at Barnard (a women's LAC) can take unlimited classes at Columbia which has greta language programs.</p>

<p>3) Students in the Five-College Consortium (Amherst, Smith, Mt. Holyoke, Hampshire, UMass Amherst) can take courses at other schools in the consortium. UMass Amherst, while not as prestigious as Columbia or Penn, has extensive language programs.</p>