Chinese and Korean studies now compete with English in Delhi University
Even though English Literature remains a favourite course among the students of Delhi University, other languages have also been gaining an increased popularity each year.
While playing a crucial role in widening a student’s horizons, these languages introduce them to the interculturality of various disciplines.
The varsity offers full term three-year-undergraduate, postgraduate, M.Phil, and Ph.D. as well as part-time courses in Indian as well as foreign languages. It also has specific departments dedicated to the study of languages.
According to V. Ramalakshmi, who is an associate professor in DU’s department of East Asian Studies, students are now showing more interest towards languages from south-eastern countries like Japanese, Chinese, and Korean. “The reason is the good pay package and comparatively lesser competition. Majority of students we get show interest towards Chinese courses,” Ms Ramalakshmi said.
The EAS department offers full time intensive courses in Korean, Chinese, and Japanese.
Many students are of the view that pursuing a language course not only opens various career options, but also helps in getting better salary packages. “After doing a specialised language course, a fresher can get manageable packages not only in India but outside India too. Japan is famous for anime cartoons so one can think of going into the animation field or even become translators,” said Manik Menon, who completed one-year intensive course in Japanese.
Various departments of the University offer several part time certificate courses at certificate, diploma, and advanced diploma level. While the department of Germanic and Romance Studies (GRS) offer part-time certificate courses in Portuguese and Romanian, the department of Slavonic and Finno-Ugrian Studies (SFUS) offers part time courses in Russian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Hungarian, and Polish.
However, to enroll in the part time courses run by the GRS department, one must be a student of DU college as these courses are not open to outsiders. Whereas, the part time courses run by SFUS department are open to students who have passed Class 12 with minimum 45 per cent marks.
In addition to these language courses, the varsity also offers linguistic courses as well. Indian languages include Bengali, Urdu, Sanskrit followed by international languages such as French, Persian, Arabic among others at the UG level. The admissions to all these courses follow a cut-off system.
Similarly, DU has master’s programmes in collaboration with the GRS department in French, German, Italian, and Spanish. The varsity also runs separate MA courses in Arabic, Japanese, Russian, Punjabi, Urdu, Sanskrit, Persian, and Bengali.
