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">Video of Modern Languages at Oxford University

Modern Languages at Oxford

Modern Languages have been taught in Oxford since 1724. The faculty is one of the largest in the country, with a total intake of more than 250 students a year (including joint courses). Undergraduate students can use the Taylor Institution Library, the biggest research library in Britain devoted to modern languages.

The University’s excellently equipped Language Centre received special praise in the last Teaching Quality Assessment. Some of its resources are specifically tailored to the needs of Modern Languages students.

Language is at the centre of the Oxford course, making up around 50% of both first year and final examinations. The course aims to teach spoken fluency in colloquial and more formal situations, the ability to write essays in the foreign language, and the ability to translate into and out of the foreign language with accuracy and sensitivity to a range of vocabulary, styles and registers.

The course also focuses on the study of literature. This gives you an understanding of other cultures that cannot be acquired solely through learning the language, and it leads you into areas such as gender issues, popular culture, theatre studies, aesthetics, anthropology, art history, ethics, history, philosophy, politics, psychology and theology. You can study a broad range of literature, or focus your studies on any period from the medieval to the present day.

There are also a wide range of options in non-literary subjects including linguistics, philology, advanced translation and film studies.

Course structure

Your first year is closely structured. You will attend oral classes and courses on the grammatical structure of your language(s), translation into and out of the language(s) and, in some of the languages, comprehension. You will also attend introductory lecture courses and participate in seminars and/or tutorials on literature. If you study either French or German as a single language, you will take a range of additional options in that language in the first year, such as literary theory and film studies. If you study any other language by itself then you must also take Linguistics in the first year.

Your other years of study give you more freedom to choose the areas on which you wish to focus, from a range of options. You will have tutorials and language classes each week in each of the languages being studied. Students studying courses with Polish take this as a subsidiary language, beginning in the second year. Catalan, Galician, Provençal, Yiddish and most of the Slavonic languages may also be taken as additional options.

Year abroad

Modern Languages students usually spend the third year of their course abroad. This is often as a paid language assistant in a foreign school, though you may also undertake other work abroad or study at a foreign university. (The exception to this is for those students taking Beginners’ Russian, who are required to spend the second year – as opposed to the third year – of their studies on a specially designed eight-month language course in the city of Yaroslavl.) Students are encouraged to spend as much as possible of their vacations in the countries whose languages they are studying. In addition to the possibility of Erasmus funding, extra financial support, including travel scholarships, may be available from your college and/or the faculty.

College choice

For guidance on making a college choice, please refer to our website for details of which language combinations are available at each college.

Deferred entry

Students are welcome to apply for deferred entry for any language courses except those including Beginners’ Russian.

Related courses

Students interested in this course might also like to consider Classics and Modern Languages, English and Modern Languages, European and Middle Eastern Languages, History and Modern Languages, Modern Languages and Linguistics, Philosophy and Modern Languages or Oriental Studies.