A recent cartoon shows a cat lurking in front of a mouse hole. The mouse asks "Who's there?" The cat replies "Arff". Thinking that there is a dog outside, the mouse comes out and is eaten. The cat turns around and says "You see, being bilingual has its advantages."
In real life, too, knowing more than one language has definite advantages. In an increasingly international world, US business establishments and the US government are eager to employ persons who know the language of at least one of the countries they dea l with. Studying the culture, society, and politics of other countries likewise requires a good grounding in the relevant languages. And even researchers and consultants in such areas as agriculture and economics need to have a good foreign language background. Even though English is studied all over the world now, that does not mean that everyone everywhere learns it well enough to understand you in an emergency. Furthermore, familiarity with English may be limited to the educated elite, who are not necessarily representative of society as a whole. And if you are dealing with people who are bilingual and you are not, you may find yourself in a situation rather similar to the mouse of the cartoon.
The Department of Linguistics offers instruction in a number of languages that provide access to a large segment of the non-Western world, as well as to important religious and literary traditions.
Africa is home to a vast number of different languages that no program could ever try to teach in their entirety. We offer instruction in several languages that are significant because they are used as inter-regional means of communication or by large and politically important populations: SWAHILI is spoken and understood by approximately 46 million people in large parts of East Africa, including Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and parts of Somalia and Zaire; LINGALA, with 6 million speakers, performs a similar function in the central African republics of Zaire and Congo; ZULU, with 7 million speakers, is the language of the largest indigenous ethnic group in newly reconstituted South Africa; WOLOF, with 6 million speakers, serves as a language of wider communication in Senegal and Mauritania, and BAMANA (or BAMBARA) serves the same function in large parts of West Africa, including Mali, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Gambia, and Senegal.
ARABIC constitutes a kind of bridge between Africa and Asia: It is spoken by 208 million people from Morocco to southern Iran and is one of the official languages of the United Nations. It is also the sacred language of Islam, one of the major world religions, and as such is known all over the world, including Indonesia, India, and Bangla Desh, the countries with the largest Muslim populations. CLASSICAL ARABIC is also the language of an impressive literary tradition and served as the vehicle through which the intellectual achievements of ancient Greece and India were preserved and transmitted to pre-modern Europe.
Modern HEBREW is the language of 4 million people in the state of Israel and has developed a lively literature of its own. BIBLICAL HEBREW is of course best known as the language of the Hebrew Bible or the Old Testament, and thus is sacred both to Judaism and to Christianity. Beyond its religious significance, it also is of interest to the student of ancient history and of Judaic literature.
Modern PERSIAN, or FARSI, is the major language of Iran with 34 million speakers there and in neighboring Afghanistan. It is thus of major significance for those who try to understand this important Middle Eastern nation, including its rich literary tradition. For many centuries it also served as the administrative language of the Mughal Empire in India.
Modern HINDI and URDU are closely related forms of language that together are the most widely used means of communication in South Asia, an area that is home to one quarter of the world's population. HINDI is spoken or understood by 383 million of the nearly one billion inhabitants of India and serves as one of the two official link languages of the Republic of India. URDU, with 96 million speakers, is the official language of Pakistan and is widely used in India, among others by Indian Muslims who constitute the second largest Islamic community in the world. Both languages have rich traditions in secular and religious literature. Our program emphasizes HINDI, and in the first year instruction includes an introduction to basic grammatical structures shared by the two languages.
SANSKRIT is still spoken by several thousand in India, although it is now dying out in spoken use. It remains, however, the most important language of traditional Indian civilization, culture, science, and religion. Its significance is comparable to the combined significance of Greek, Latin, and Hebrew in the tradition of Western civilization. Its earliest texts, the Vedas, go back as far as 1500 B.C., but its use as a literary language continues to the present day.