The RC teaches six languages: Spanish, French, German, Russian, Japanese, and American Sign Language. What they share is a method. You don't study the language for a few years and then, someday, use it. You use it from the first week, in class and in the life around the class, until understanding it stops feeling like translation. That surrounding life is the part most programs don't have.
What Makes RC Language Programs Unique?
- Classes are small and immersive, and they sit inside a steady rhythm of conversation tables, lunch tables, coffee hours, film screenings, and people to talk to at every level of ability. The classroom gives you the grammar and the footing. Everything around it is where the language actually sinks in.
- Classes are small enough that you'll know everyone, faculty included, and a lot of students find that's where their closest friendships start. The languages also tie into majors and minors across international studies, history, political science, and global health, so you can build language study into a real academic path instead of treating it as a box to clear.
- We'll push you to take the language somewhere real. Sometimes that's small: helping a lost traveler in an airport, or making a friend whose background is nothing like your own. Sometimes it's bigger: study abroad and internships in healthcare systems in Madagascar, political science in Paris, or a placement in Japan. Nothing builds fluency faster than needing the language to get through your day, and you come back with context no classroom can give you.
RC Language Requirement
Select a Language & Learn More!
Why Study a Language?
Learning another language changes how you read people, and it tends to expose assumptions you didn't know you had. Whether you're continuing something from high school or starting cold, the RC gives you the structure and the people to get genuinely fluent. The habits you build doing it, thinking carefully, listening closely, working with people who don't share your background, follow you into whatever comes next.
Career and Academic Advantages
A language you actually command is useful almost everywhere:
- International business and trade
- Diplomacy and government service
- Education and academia
- Medicine and healthcare
- Law and immigration services
- Arts, media, and cultural studies
Few things you study travel to as many places.
Community
These programs turn into a community, often one that outlasts the degree. You leave able to talk with people you couldn't have talked to before, which was the whole reason to start.
Choosing the Specific Language
- Spanish is the closest thing the US has to a second national language. More than 40 million people speak it at home here, and it now appears in the large majority of American job ads that ask for a second language. You feel that most in healthcare, where clinics are short on staff who can talk to Spanish-speaking patients without an interpreter, and the same gap runs through law, education, and social work. Learn it and you can use it Monday morning without leaving the country.
- French quietly became the fourth most spoken language in the world, and the reason is Africa. About two-thirds of French speakers now live there, across some of the fastest-growing economies anywhere, and that share is still climbing. French also remains the language of the rooms where international decisions get made, from the UN and EU to the courts at The Hague. RC French students practice at Baratin and the French Table. If you're drawn to diplomacy or development work, this is the one to pick.
- German runs the largest economy in Europe, and it runs on engineering. Its car industry alone, Volkswagen, Mercedes, and BMW, turns over more than half a trillion euros a year, and behind it sits a dense web of mid-sized machine-building firms that quietly lead their niches worldwide. There's an older draw too: a huge share of the Western philosophical and scientific record was written in German, so if you're headed into research or academia, you'll want it. It's a strong fit for anyone serious about engineering or the sciences.
- Russian is a language the US government will pay you to learn. It sits on every intelligence agency's critical-needs list, and demand has climbed since 2022, with the CIA, NSA, and their European counterparts hiring fluent speakers. Federal scholarships like Boren and the Critical Language Scholarship exist in large part to get more Americans studying it. Outside of security work, it's your way into the literature, politics, and history of Russia and much of Central Asia and the Caucasus.
- Japanese builds the machines that build everything else. It makes close to 40% of the world's industrial robots, it's spending heavily to produce the next generation of semiconductors, and its carmakers still set the standard others chase. The same culture behind that precision industry also produced the games, animation, and product design the rest of the world imitates. For anyone aiming at technology or design, Japanese puts you near the source.
- American Sign Language is the one language here you'll use in your own town rather than overseas. It's a full language with its own grammar, and there are nowhere near enough fluent people to meet the need, especially in hospitals, schools, and courtrooms, where qualified interpreters are genuinely scarce. It fits naturally with careers in healthcare and education, and it lets you talk with people most hearing folks simply can't. Note: The RC teaches an ASL sequence, and it does not satisfy the RC language requirement. RCASL 202, the fourth-semester course, does satisfy the LSA undergraduate language requirement. If ASL is what you want, talk to your advisor early so you know what it covers and what it leaves open, especially if you already speak another language fluently!
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Courses that Complete the RC Language Requirement
Last Updated: 07/17/2026
