International Programs
in the School of Arts and Sciences

Foreign Languages Taught in Departments
and in the Penn Language Center (PLC)

Foreign language proficiency is a prerequisite for the educated mind. Accordingly, SAS encourages students to do more than simply satisfy the minimum requirement in a foreign language.

SAS faculty teach many modern European and Asian languages within departments and in the Penn Language Center.

African Studies offers Swahili; Hausa, Yoruba, and Amharic are taught in the Penn Language Center (PLC).

Asian and Middle Eastern Studies covers Mandarin, Cantonese, Shanghainese, Taiwanese, Tibetan, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Malay, and Thai in Asia; and Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Uzbek in the Middle East.

Classical Studies teaches modern Greek.

Germanic Languages teaches German, Dutch, Swedish, and Yiddish.

Linguistics offers courses in Irish Gaelic, which is taught in the Penn Language Center.

Romance Languages fields French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish.

Slavic Languages teaches Russian; PLC covers many other languages spoken in Eastern Europe--Polish, Lithuanian, Romanian, Hungarian, Georgian, Serbo-Croation, Ukranian, Bulgarian, Slovak, and Czech.

South Asian Regional Studies offers Hindi, and Urdu. Bengali, Gujarati, Nepali, Malayalam, Tamil, and Panjabi are offered in PLC.

The Penn Language Center, administered through the College of General Studies, offers many other, less commonly taught languages (e.g., Azeri, Ewe, Fulani, Marathi, Wolof, and Zulu). PLC also teaches languages on demand (custom-designed), languages for special use (business, professions, health care), and languages for research.