The faculty of Arts and Sciences considers competence in a foreign language essential for an educated person. Participation in the global community is predicated on the ability to understand and appreciate cultural difference, and nothing brings this more sharply into focus than the experience of learning a foreign language. Foreign language study not only affords unique access to a different culture and its ways of life and thought; it also increases awareness of one's own language and culture. For these reasons, the College of Arts and Sciences sets forth a Language Requirement. Students also may take advanced language courses to obtain a language certificate or a minor, which is noted on the student's transcript.
The University of Pennsylvania offers instruction in well over 40 languages, including Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Dutch and so on. In addition to the language courses that are offered as part of the degree programs in various majors, the Penn Language Center allows the University of Pennsylvania to offer a wide variety of less commonly taught languages, as well as other language courses for special purposes. While students often opt to satisfy the Language Requirement by continuing to study the language they began in high school or earlier, the wealth of languages that the University offers is such that many students decide to explore a new culture and area of our globe by beginning a foreign language that they have never studied before. French, Spanish, and sometimes German are taught frequently at the pre-collegiate level, but Arabic, Chinese and Japanese—let alone Uzbek and Hausa—are much less available; all of them are modes of access to fascinating and important cultures and histories.
Currently offered foreign and classical languages:
Akkadian, American Sign Language, Amharic, Arabic, Aramaic, Bengali, Cantonese, Chinese (Classical), Czech, Dutch, French, German, Greek (Classical), Greek (Modern), Gujarati, Hebrew (Biblical), Hebrew (Modern), Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Korean, Late Egyptian, Latin, Malayalam, Mandarin, Panjabi, Pashto, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Sanskrit, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Taiwanese, Tamil, Thai, Turkish, Urdu, Vietnamese, Yiddish, Yoruba.
