Some 60 languages are taught on campus and revitalizing and preserving endangered languages is a priority

By Gretchen Kell, UC Berkeley News

At least 60 languages — from Mongolian and Old Norse to Polish, Catalan, Ancient Egyptian, Arabic and Biblical Hebrew — are taught at UC Berkeley, one of the nation’s top institutions for the breadth and depth of its world languages program.

A growing emphasis also is being placed at Berkeley on revitalizing and preserving endangered languages, most of them spoken by Indigenous peoples.

To help honor more than 150 years of global languages at Berkeley, 63 colorful banners began flying throughout campus last week — and for the next 18 months — that feature facts about the campus’s language programs, as well as 21 bilingual and multilingual faculty members, students and alumni.

Among the messages on the banners:

• Collectively, undergraduates at UC Berkeley speak more than 220 different first languages.
• More than 500 language learning classes are taught at Berkeley annually.
• More than 6,000 Berkeley students enroll in those classes each year.
• In 1872, the first endowed chair in the UC system was created — for the study of East Asian languages at Berkeley.
• Students at all UC campuses can take online African language classes at Berkeley, which is well-known for Amharic, Igbo and Swahili instruction.

Across the country, some colleges and universities are eliminating world language courses to save money. West Virginia’s flagship public university, for example, recently ended courses and degree programs in all foreign languages except Spanish and Chinese.

Meanwhile, Berkeley has “a longstanding commitment to linguistic diversity and the humanistic insights that come from the study of world languages, literatures and cultures,” said Rick Kern, French professor and chair of the French department. “We think that Berkeley can be a model of multilingual global engagement.”

Kern is co-chair of the campus’s Task Force on Languages, Language-Based Disciplines and Global Citizenship that was initiated by Sara Guyer, dean of the College of Letters and Sciences’ Division of Arts and Humanities.

The committee met for three semesters and presented its recommendations last summer on how the campus can enhance and support instructional and research strengths in global languages.

Guyer said the study of so many languages on campus “opens up new worlds of knowledge, research and communication.” She added that Berkeley’s steadfast commitment to multilingualism is an effort to help students become global citizens who can “interact meaningfully with people and ideas from different regions of our fast-changing world.”

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