In Zagreb, those are Hindu and Hebrew.

We also have a 3 year curriculum on Chinese and Japanese. As far as I know, there are plans to make studying Roma language as an option, but also as a 3 year program.

Oddly enough, we don’t have Albanian and Arabic.

You can study all European languages besides the already mentioned Albanian, the Baltic languages, Danish, Maltese, Finnish and Icelandic. We don’t have Moldovan and Norweigan, but we do have Romanian and Swedish. Turkish is also an option.

(Non-nation state languages such as Basque, Sorbian, or Kurdish are very accepteble answers. Romansh too.)

EDIT: By unusual, I also mean the European languages. Hungarian or Slovenian would be unusual elsewhere, but for us they are neighbouring countries.

9 comments
  1. I don’t think Palermo University (my local one) offers any ‘unusual’ languages as a full degree course.

    They offer Arabic.Also Russian,and Portuguese I think.Plus the usual ones like French,Spanish etc.

  2. At the university in Oslo, there’s nothing too special it seems. There’s a bachelor’s in European language where the most unusual choices are Polish, Czech or Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian language. And a bachelor’s in Asian and Middle Eastern studies where you can choose Hindi or Farsi/Persian and I think they used to have Hebrew, but not anymore.

    The most unusual language related option I’d say is a bachelor’s in “Clear language” which is about the language used by public administration and how to make it more understandable for people.

  3. Elfdalian (Älvdalska), it is in Sweden actually classified as a dialect of Swedish but in reality everyone considered it to be its own language. As someone that doesn’t speak it and dont understand it, it sounds like a mix of English, Swedish and Icelandic. It is classified internationally as an Island Scandinavian language, similar to how they would have spoken ancient Nordic on Shetland, Orkney and the Faroe Islands. Elfdalian has about 2000 native speakers in Sweden. The course are held by Uppsala University but on remote in the Älvdalen region.

  4. Edinburgh University offers various Celtic courses, either solo or combined with other languages, which includes learning of Scottish Gaelic.

    There is also an *Arabic and Ancient Greek* MA, but that just seems to be modern Arabic and Greek with a focus on the history of the language, rather than any attempt to recreate speech.

    The most “unusual” language offered beyond that is Persian/Farsi and its variants, but they’re spoken by over 100m people so hardly that unusual.

    There are also various short courses over 1 year including Swahili, Gaelic, Turkish, and British Sign Language.

  5. At my uni we have English, American, French, German, Iberian, Italian, Oriental, Chinese and Scandinavian Studies, but none of these are pure language degrees. They’re all a mix of language courses and culture/literatur/politics/etc courses.

    As for languages that just any student can take a course in the most unusual ones are Icelandic, Swahili or Catalan.

  6. Universities don’t *have* to offer anything, they can design their own programs.

    Probably the oddest one is the bachelor’s program in Celtic Languages and Cultures in Utrecht, where apparently you’ll learn not any modern Celtic languages but Old Irish and Middle Welsh for some reason

    Edit: not a separate program, but at the University of Amsterdam as part of European Studies you can learn Catalan, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian or Czech. Slavic Languages and Cultures at the same offers Serbo-Croatian and Czech. Middle Eastern studies in Leiden includes the possibility to learn Persian. Some programs also offer things like Turkish and Polish but considering the sizeable communities here who speak those languages I don’t think these would be odd choices.

Leave a Reply
You May Also Like