Language Teaching
Studying
Modern Spoken K'iche' Maya
in Nahuala, Guatemala
Modern Language Courses
At the University of Chicago, language acquisition courses in Spanish and Portuguese are administered through the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures. Spanish enrollments top those of all other foreign languages - annual enrollments in the second-year sequence of courses in Spanish language, history, and culture exceed 500. In recent years, growth in Portuguese language enrollments grew by 70% to over 150 annually. As more and more students acquire higher levels of proficiency in Spanish and Portuguese, there is increasing demand for courses in the target language across the disciplines. The Center for Latin American Studies now regularly offers two discussion sections in Spanish and one discussion section in Portuguese for our popular Introduction to Latin American Civilizations course sequence.
Indigenous Language Courses
The study of languages indigenous to Latin America has a long and revered history at the University of Chicago and plays a key role in Latin American Studies. Indigenous language study includes modern spoken languages as well as languages with a significant historical written archive. Study of indigenous languages facilitates student and faculty human subject, archival, and archaeological field and archival research across disciplines. The University sponsors courses in Yucatec Maya, K'iche' Maya, and Nahuatl, three indigenous languages with significant numbers of modern day speakers and significant historical archives. Since 1990, the Center has sponsored a summer intensive course in Aymara, an indigenous language spoken by more than one million people in Bolivia and Peru. Quechua is offered by our Title VI National Resource Center partner, the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Illinois-Urbana/Champaign. The emphasis of these instructional programs is on developing communicative proficiency in modern spoken languages for future field or archival research.
University of Chicago graduate students who are interested in studying any of these languages are encouraged to apply for Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowships.
Students from outside the University of Chicago who are interested in studying any of these languages are encouraged to explore possibilities for enrollment and funding, such as the CIC Traveling Scholar Program (including the Foreign Language Enhancement Program scholarships), the Exchange Scholar Program, and the Graduate Student-at-Large Program.
Funding for instruction and curricular resource development is provided in part by a Title VI National Resource Center grant from the US Department of Education.
Indigenous Language Resources
The Chicago Archive of Indigenous Literatures of Latin America collects and catalogs materials originally written in Meso-American indigenous languages. Special annexes to the Archive for Yucatec, K'iche' and Náhuatl (the languages taught here) include grammars, dictionaries, and other secondary material on the languages. This is the only collection of its kind in the United States.
The Guide to the Microfilm Collection of Manuscripts on Cultural Anthropology lists the resources developed by Professor Norman McQuown available through the Regenstein Library.
