Willkommen! Bienvenue! مَرْحَباً ! ยินดีต้อนรับ! Ivy Day has recently passed, and many excited high school seniors have just received their Harvard acceptances. Now comes their next hurdle: graduating. An essential component of Harvard College’s liberal arts curriculum is the foreign language requirement. While it can be quickly fulfilled by scoring a 5 on any Advanced Placement Language exam, many students choose to take a language course anyway to engage in a different culture or dialect. The College offers over 80 foreign languages and language tutorials from across the globe, such as Scottish Gaelic, Yoruba, and Hittite.
Most undergraduates continue languages they pursued in high school—about 50% of American learners take Spanish in high school, while another 20% take French—yet some at Harvard are choosing to stray from these conventional paths and study lesser-known languages. Offering more than just an academic experience, these niche courses can be vital in preserving heritage and cultures that are either hard to connect with in an increasingly English-dominated world or actively being erased.
Keeping Found Family Strong
Currently enrolled in Swedish at the College, Cyrus Hamlin ’27 turned to this foreign language to preserve and strengthen intergenerational bonds.
“Before my dad was born, a Swede named Carl Otto… came to the U.S. and spent a summer with my family,” Hamlin recalled. “Carl Otto and my family grew up and had children of their own, born at about the same time…when my dad was a teenager, he spent a summer in Sweden with Carl’s teenage children. The next summer, they spent the summer with my dad.”
Hamlin himself became part of the tradition, visiting Sweden on alternating years just as Carl’s family came and visited him. This familial connection deepened when, eventually, Hamlin’s cousin married one of Carl’s grandchildren and moved to Sweden.
Motivated by these ties, Hamlin has discovered vast resources to grow his understanding of the Swedish language and culture upon arriving in Cambridge. At Harvard, one professor teaches all levels of Swedish, Dr. Agnes Broomé, which ensures a consistent teaching style. The Scandinavian Studies Program also offers ample study abroad opportunities in the summer, such as Swedish immersion at Uppsala University or the Viking Studies course.
From his experience with Swedish, Hamlin has also learned the broader benefits of foreign languages. “It enables you to see the world from a different perspective and become cognizant of our normative English perspective and how that impacts our lives.”
Keeping a Language—and a Culture—Alive
For Tenzin Yiga ’27, Tibetan is more than just a class—she sees her speech as inseparable from her identity.
“The Tibetan language is one that is actively under attack by the Chinese government,” Yiga explained. “Since Tibet’s occupation in 1959, the once-independent country of Tibet has remained under Chinese control. And with the oppressive policies against the Tibetan people, our language, culture, religion, and very way of life is being destroyed.”
Although her family became even more isolated after immigrating to America, they were nonetheless determined to preserve their culture.
“We had the rule that at home we would only speak in Tibetan, in hopes of preserving and maintaining what I knew, and while I was at school I would speak and learn in English and Spanish,” Yiga said. “To this day, I’m so grateful for the opportunity to learn both languages at school and be able to communicate with others while still retaining my native tongue.”
Although Tibetan is her first language, she rarely gets to speak or practice it outside her family.
Upon arriving on Harvard’s campus, Yiga explained how continuing her study of Tibetan, now in an academic setting, has been vital to her linguistic development. “Having the opportunity to practice Tibetan in an academic setting has been crucial in not only retaining but improving in Tibetan,” she said. At the College, PhD candidate Yunyao Zhai is the Classical Tibetan instructor, Karma Gongde is the Colloquial Tibetan Instructor, and Leonard van der Kuijp is the Professor of Tibetan and Himalayan Studies.
Juggling English, Spanish, and Tibetan in high school first taught Yiga how to manage retaining her Tibetan while acclimating to the United States. Now at Harvard, Yiga continues to learn lessons that help her keep her heritage and spread its meaning: “Preserving the Tibetan language is not just a responsibility but a duty that I bear in order to keep my identity and the rich and vast cultural heritage of Tibet alive.” Ultimately, in a world where minority languages are disappearing, Yiga’s decision reflects a broader movement of individuals using education to resist cultural erasure.
Polyglot and Polycultural Pal
Vandie Dumaboc ’26 has taken an unconventional approach to language learning. She grew up bilingual, fluent in both Spanish and English, sparking her love of languages. In high school, she taught herself elementary Norwegian. When she arrived at Harvard, she decided to take Advanced Norwegian, along with the full progression of German classes.
Her immersion in multiple languages has both widened her perspective on foreign nations and introduced her to countless friends and connections.
“Because of knowing these ‘obscure’ languages, I have had the warmest interactions with people from cultures that are ‘deemed’ as cold,” Dumaboc said. “Yesterday, I was at an event from the Royal Norwegian Consulate in Boston, and I found myself greeting many people with hugs, being genuinely excited to see them, and even making new acquaintances.”
Beyond the bonds she has made between peers of similar linguistic interests or cultures, Dumaboc has also found that her study of these lesser-known languages has broadened her worldview about different cultures. “I am on the side that believes that language shapes culture more than the other way around,” Dumaboc said.
This connection between language and culture is why languages have given Dumaboc a more nuanced outlook on the world. “You learn that the order in which you think is not the only (or correct) way,” explained Dumaboc. She elaborated with an analogy about grammar: “When I speak Spanish, the noun takes precedence, yet in English we place the adjective first…when I speak German or Irish, I know exactly what role each compound of the sentence plays because of the cases, and so on.”
The Barriers to Language Learning in America
Learning languages not only teaches us something new about other nations and peoples but also binds us together as a community with our greater understanding. Preserving these cross-cultural bonds and knowledge, however, has become more difficult in recent years.
Just last month, President Donald Trump designated English as the official language of the United States. Historically a cultural melting pot, America was one of only five countries that did not have a national language. As a result of this new mandate, many organizations and communities have spoken out against this rebuttal of multilingualism.
Trump’s recent executive order, however, extends beyond national policy. Rather, it also reflects a trend in American linguistic education, where the United States already lags behind other developed nations in foreign language education. From 2016 to 2021, foreign language enrollment at universities dropped by 16.6%, the steepest decline ever recorded.
All three interviewees also agreed that the U.S. is inferior to other countries in language education. “In many other countries—mainly European—they begin learning English in elementary school, and it becomes fairly developed as they continue it until graduation,” noted Hamlin.
Dumaboc’s sister, meanwhile, who attends an international school, takes classes in multiple languages: “All her classes are in Danish, except for French and English. She almost never speaks Spanish there, and her accent [for] all these languages is close to native…The key was immersion and early exposition.”
In contrast, American schools often introduce foreign languages too late, often superficially, and fail to provide a consistent curriculum. Hamlin found learning German difficult in high school because of the unpredictable teaching quality. “My first year German teacher was amazing, but the second year teacher was really bad and had us just do an online program—she had an emergency certification and didn’t know German.”
Dumaboc believes that the way languages are taught in the U.S. presents a major challenge to learners. In her view, exposure from a young age is crucial for fluency, and U.S. schools do not foster a strong sense of connection to global cultures. Moreover, she suggested that the grammar-heavy curriculum many American schools take could be improved on: “No human baby learns grammar first; it is simply unnatural to teach it that way.”
Yiga similarly believes that this disadvantage limits Americans’ ability to engage in cross-cultural exchanges. “In most countries outside the U.S., people learn two or even three languages on top of their native language. Americans have a huge disadvantage when it comes to cross-cultural exchange and communication with people from other parts of the world.”
It does not help that English is now the lingua franca, or trade language, for much of the globe. “I’ve met U.S. citizens who have moved abroad for over 10 years and haven’t learned the language because ‘English gets them by,’” said Dumaboc.
Despite these challenges, Hamlin, Yiga, and Dumaboc are prime examples of the power of learning a foreign language. One of the most crucial parts of a Harvard, or even any liberal arts, education is the pursuit of learning for learning’s sake—academic transformation, as Dean Khurana calls it. Yiga put it best: “With a more globalized world, now more than ever, it is critical to learn other languages, especially at institutions like Harvard where there are expansive resources and opportunities to do so.”
Language is our most powerful tool for communication. As the world grows more afraid and begins to shut out that which they cannot understand, it is even more important to engage with different ways of life so we do not find ourselves bound to just one. The empathy and compassion that we can gain through learning languages are immeasurable. Every language, no matter how obscure, carries stories worth telling and traditions worth preserving.
Caroline Stohrer ’28 (carolinestohrer@college.harvard.edu) hopes more students take advantage of Harvard’s amazing language offerings.