French is spoken in more than 50 countries worldwide, is an official language in 29 countries, and maintains its status as a major language of culture, diplomacy, and economics. The Organisation internationale de la Francophonie, established in 1970 and usually referred to as “La Francophonie,” includes 53 member states on several continents. French is a passport to much of the world! In the French sector in the Department of Romance Languages, we teach courses ranging from beginning language instruction through graduate seminars designed for Masters and Ph.D. students. Our language courses emphasize real-world proficiency as well as the history and culture of the Francophone world.

The field of classics embraces all aspects of Greek and Roman culture from the prehistoric to the medieval period.

Although known as the land of snake-charmers, mythologies, mysticism, and diversity – India is now also a land of opportunities. The growth of modern science and technology in India is changing the patterns of life and is posing many a research question. Hindi provides a glimpse into this progressive culture standing the litmus test of time. Learning Hindi is as simple as learning any other language of the world. It just requires students to once more be persistent, ignorant, imitative, innocent and inquisitive as everyone is in one’s childhood. Did you learn or acquire your mother tongue? Is acquisition of a language possible after critical age?

An estimated 180 million people worldwide speak Italian as their primary or secondary language. Almost 17 million North Americans identify as having Italian ancestry. Italian culture is traditionally recognized for its rich contributions to art, architecture, music, literature, and philosophy. Today Italy attracts interest in a wide variety of areas, including tourism, its emigrant heritage, filmmaking, fashion industry, and gastronomy.

Korean is the official language of both North Korea and South Korea, which have a total combined population of around 73 million (23 million in the North and 50 million in the South). Korean is also spoken in large ethnic Korean communities in the USA, China, Japan, and Central Asia. In the past, Korean was often written using Chinese characters or Hanja. However, use of Hanja has now more or less been replaced by an indigenous alphabetic script known as Hangul, which was invented in 1443 by King Sejong (possibly with the help of other scholars).

The Chinese language is the oldest written language in the world with at least six thousand years of history. Chinese character inscriptions have been found in turtle shells dating back to the Shang dynasty (1766-1123 BC) proving the written language has existed for more than 3,000 years. The Chinese written language uses single distinctive symbols, or characters, to represent each word of the vocabulary.

Farsi, or Persian, is an Indo-European language spoken primarily in Iran with dialects spoken in Afghanistan (Dari) and Tajikistan (Tajik). It has a wide range of influence from the Turkic languages and Arabic, but is still distinctively its own. There are 110 million speakers of Farsi in the world. Though Iran is adjacent to Arab countries and Farsi uses the Arabic script, the culture and language is distinguishable. Farsi has added letters to the Arabic alphabet and has its own pronunciation.

The Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies is the home of undergraduate and graduate programs in all fields connected to Russia, Eastern Europe, and former Soviet Eurasia at the University of Oregon. Together with its sister programs in the Oregon Consortium of International and Area Studies Programs (OCIAS), the Center is located in Prince Lucien Campbell Hall (PLC) on the University of Oregon campus.

Spanish Heritage Language program (SHL) program is designed for students who grew up in a Spanish-speaking household or community in a country where Spanish is not the dominant language, such as the United States. SHL offers a variety of classes to meet students’ needs as heritage learners. Students with Spanish-language heritage will explore topics related to their cultural background, and coursework is designed to help them recover and/or develop their heritage linguistic abilities. For more information about the SHL program please email: herencia@uoregon.edu

Approximately 20 million people’s mother tongue is a Scandinavian language, and notable Scandinavian literature spans a broad range from the beloved children’s stories of Hans Christian Andersen to the modern crime novels by Stieg Larsson. The University of Oregon Department of German and Scandinavian ranks among the top 10 colleges and universities in the number of students majoring in German. The University of Oregon also has the only program in Oregon in which students can get a major or a minor in Scandinavian. Classes are discussion-based with engaging activities designed to involve and engross students, with both group and individual writing assignments

Turkish, also referred to as Istanbul Turkish, is the most widely spoken of the Turkic languages, with about 75 million speakers in Turkey and in 35 other countries, including Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Cyprus, Denmark, El Salvador, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Honduras, Iran, Iraq and Israel. Turkish Culture is unique in the world in that it has influenced and has been influenced in return by cultures and civilizations from China to Vienna and from Russian steps to North Africa for over a millennia.