Harvard Updates Its Foreign Language Requirement
In the US, many universities require students to take foreign language courses before they graduate. But some universities allow students who already speak a language other than English to take a proficiency test instead of a course.
Until recently, students at Harvard, America’s oldest university, could only take a language proficiency test if the language was taught at the university, or if there was an expert on Harvard's faculty who knew the language.
However, some Harvard students speak foreign languages that none of the faculty have studied, but would still like to receive credit for them.
Eli Langley is one of those students. Langley speaks Koasati, the language of the Coushatta Tribe, a Native American tribe in Louisiana with about 860 members.
When he arrived at Harvard in 2016, Langley said he was disappointed to find that he couldn’t use Koasati to meet the university’s language requirement. He spent two and a half years petitioning Harvard to receive credit for his language and even took a one-year break from classes to do so.
In November 2018, the Harvard faculty voted to update its language requirement. Now, students who want to meet the requirement with a language not offered by the university can request an expert from another university to give the test.
The faculty also chose to recognize languages that have no written component, such as sign languages. They hope these changes will help support diversity and maybe even save a few dying languages.
About a quarter of the world’s languages have fewer than 1,000 native speakers, and if nothing changes, nearly half will disappear within the next 100 years. This is a serious problem because when a language dies, a culture may die with it.
Sadly, fewer foreign languages are being taught in the US. A recent survey by the Modern Language Association found that American universities had lost 651 language programs between 2013 and 2016.
