Examining Language Major Nomenclatures

Is there a system to these degree titles? Or is it just vibes?

In my role as a student advisor at IU, I see a lot of students’ academic profiles. One thing that stuck out to me was how many majors end with the word “studies.” There are international studies, liberal studies, and American studies. But as I looked into it, the most common seem to be the regional studies degrees.

Six of them focus on language learning. These are:

Germanic Studies
India Studies
Jewish Studies
Central Eurasian Studies
Classical Studies
East Asian Studies

But, I asked myself, those can’t be all the language-centric majors here, right? Another naming convention is majors with the words “languages and culture,” of which there are three:

East Asian Languages and Culture
Middle Eastern Languages and Culture
Slavic and East European Languages and Culture

But we’re still missing some pretty obvious ones. The last category are majors where the title is simply the name of a language, of which there are four:

Spanish
Portuguese
French
Italian

IU offers minors in many other languages, but these are the thirteen pathways that can result in a major. Are these three different naming conventions connected to structural differences in their curriculum? Or did different people just think the names looked cool? I’m going to try to find out.

A supplementary introduction

Most students don’t major in languages. All of these programs combined have about 600 total students seeking a degree, half of whom are graduate students. Here’s a little data visualization I pulled from my old friend, the Indiana University Decision Support Initiative Academics Metrics 360 Dashboard— Student Majors by RC:

You should probably ignore the rightmost column in the top left quadrant, as it includes students who are currently still in the process of enrolling. Also the downward trend is true, but less true than you’d think, as students tend to add language degrees as second majors later in their academic career. Also, this caption is too long.

That’s about 1% of students at IU. But almost every student studying a language is not majoring in it. Since foreign language proficiency is required for many programs on campus, students typically enroll in a language to meet their graduation requirements and then stop.

Today, I’d like to focus on the students who don’t stop and figure out whether their academic major will be structured differently based on the language they choose to study.

But first, I must break the illusion here that I’m processing this in real time. I already figured out what I want to say before I started writing. I cannot stream of consciousness curricular data.

So, while I began this post with separations based on naming conventions, I’m going to break up those thirteen categories according to their curricular overlap, setting aside their nomenclature for the moment.

The All-In Majors

This first reorganized category includes five degree programs:

Germanic Studies
Classical Studies (Latin and Greek)
Spanish
French
Italian

What these majors have in common is an overwhelming focus on coursework taught in the language. The programs require between 30-33 credit hours, and at least 24 credits must come from classes in which English is not the language of instruction.

Now, English is not the language of instruction for any foreign language class. The difference here is that these majors offer coursework on literature, music, culture, and history in their non-English language as well.

What you’ll notice is these are mostly single-language majors. The “Germanic Studies” department also includes courses in Dutch, Norwegian, and Yiddish. While those other languages can be taken as minors, most of your coursework must be in German to earn a major in Germanic Studies.

The Advanced Majors

This category includes five programs:

Portuguese
Central Eurasian Studies (Finnish, Estonian, Uzbek, Uyghur, Hungarian, Persian, Mongolian, Tibetan, Turkish)
East Asian Languages and Culture (Korean, Chinese, Japanese)
Middle Eastern Languages and Culture (Arabic, Egyptian, Persian, Turkish, Modern Hebrew)
Slavic and East European Languages and Culture (Russian track only)

These majors offer similar amounts of “language learning” courses as the previous category, meaning they teach courses through the “advanced” level to undergraduates. This means you can take three straight years of any of these languages if you start with the introductory section.

The difference is that these majors do not require, and typically do not offer, many non-language-learning courses in the language you’re studying.

For some programs, that’s likely just an issue of scale. While there are about 100 Spanish majors at IU, there is currently only one student majoring in Portuguese. As much as the faculty would surely love to offer their “Brazilian Cinema” course in Portuguese, they lack a critical mass of students capable of keeping up. The same holds true for Russian.

In other programs, it’s an issue of coordination. For example, while the Central Eurasian Studies program can offer advanced coursework in nine languages, most of the department’s classes do not focus on a single country. They have a regional focus. They also tend to draw in students from other programs, especially International Studies. Because the major requires many of the same courses no matter which language you specialize in, they have to use English as the language of instruction. The same phenomenon holds true for the East Asian and Middle Eastern programs.

The Intermediate Majors

This group includes four final degree tracks:

India Studies (Bengali, Hindi, Sanskrit, Urdu, Persian, Tibetan)
Jewish Studies (Modern Hebrew, Biblical Hebrew, Yiddish)
East Asian Studies (Korean, Chinese, Japanese)
Slavic and East European Languages and Culture (Czech, Polish, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian tracks only)

These are the majors where “language-learning” coursework is only offered formally through the “intermediate” level. This means that if you began one of these languages at the introductory level, you could only take it for four semesters.

One exception here is East Asian Studies. This is offered by the same department as East Asian Languages and Culture. The difference is that it only requires learning the language through the intermediate level, instead requiring more coursework about regional history, culture, and society than its more language-focused counterpart.

The other exception is Jewish Studies. While Modern Hebrew is offered at the advanced level at IU, you can major in Jewish studies by pursuing any of its three language tracks through the intermediate level and then taking more culture-centric coursework offered in English.

All of these majors separate themselves from being minors due to the robustness of their supplementary offerings. For example, look at the African Languages minor. That department has coursework in five languages through the intermediate level, but it doesn’t offer enough other cultural studies courses in English to make it a major.

So, what’s in a name?

If we go back to my original question, does the naming convention have anything to do with the structure of these programs?

One thing that is clear is that when a major is just the name of one language, that’s the language you’ll study. There’s no way of avoiding Spanish in the Spanish major. Germanic Studies is mostly a German major, but you can fulfill some requirements with other languages.

When you see “Studies,” that’s a clue that the department offers multiple languages.

Of course, that’s also true of the “Languages and Culture” majors.

I think the difference is most clear for the two “East Asian” majors. In that case, the “Languages and Culture” tag indicates it has more robust language requirements than “East Asian Studies.”

While that relative intensity doesn’t hold true for the “Slavic” major, I have an idea of why. There are currently only 21 students majoring in the Slavic and East European Languages and Culture program. This is likely why the Russian program cannot break off as its own major. So while Russian is the only “advanced” track available, its status “pulls up” the combined major.

Or not? Maybe it just sounds cool? Because by this logic, there’s no apparent reason for Central Eurasian Studies to use the “studies” tag when they have tracks for advanced language study.

My last note is that all three “Languages and Culture” majors are housed in the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies. This is a subdivision of the College of Arts and Sciences, and the languages taught there are those deemed “critical” for diplomatic training. So, the naming convention appears to be a product of that program.

Of course, Central Eurasian Studies and India Studies are also housed in Hamilton Lugar. So, while the “Languages and Culture” label is exclusive to Hamilton Lugar, it’s not universal.

I have no idea why.

The End.

-Matt