The Language Requirement and Offerings
The College requires graduates to have taken two courses in the same language other than English to allow students to explore a new language or deepen their skills in a language they have already studied or used. Consistent with the First Year At Barnard policy any first-year student taking a language during their first year that is offered at Barnard must take the language at Barnard, not Columbia.
Languages Offered at Barnard College
- American Sign Language (ASL)
- Chinese
- French
- German
- Italian
- Korean
- Russian
- Spanish
Languages Offered at Columbia University
Columbia offers 41 modern and ancient languages representing the geographic locations of the world:
- Africa: Swahili, Pulaar, Wolof, Yoruba, Zulu
- European & Eurasian: Armenian, Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian, Catalan, Czech, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek (Classical and Modern), Latin, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian, Yiddish
- East Asia: Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, Tibetan
- Middle East: Akkadian, Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, Turkish (Modern)
- South Asia: Bengali, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Tamil
- Southeast Asia: Vietnamese