Five College Center for the Study of World Languages

The Five College Center for the Study of World Languages offers courses in less-commonly studied languages for students at Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, and Smith Colleges and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Course sessions meet on all five campuses. Courses are taken for academic credit and are part of a student's regular course load. Five College students are not required to pay any special fees or tuition in order to enroll.

Hindi Courses                             Swahili Courses                    Turkish Courses

Spoken Arabic Courses                               Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian Courses 

Persian Courses                     Independent Plus Urdu and Indonesian Courses


Supervised Independent Language Courses in Many Languages: 

  • African Languages: Afrikaans (South Africa), Amharic (Ethiopia), Shona (Zimbabwe), Twi (Ghana), Wolof (Senegal), Zulu (South Africa)     

  • European Languages: Albanian, Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Georgian, Modern Greek, Hungarian, Modern Irish, Norwegian, Romanian, Ukrainian, NEW FOR FALL 2014:  Finnish, Icelandic, possibly Dutch

  • Asian Languages: Bangla/Bengali (Bangladesh and India), Burmese, Dari (Afghan Persian), Filipino (Philippines), Malay (Malaysia), Mongolian, Nepali, Pashto (Afghanistan and Pakistan), Thai, Tibetan, Vietnamese

  • Languages of the Americas: Haitian Creole 

  • Other languages may be added. Some languages become unavailable for a given semester. Some languages may appear in the catalog, but only be available intermittently. If you do not see your language of interest, please e-mail for more information.

Summer 2014 Courses

Summer courses will be offered in 2014 in collaboration with Mount Holyoke Extension:  American Sign Language, Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Russian, Spanish, Swahili.

Charles Mark Scholarships for Study Abroad

Two scholarships endowed by Professor Emeritus Charles Mark support study abroad by Five College Center for the Study of World Languages students. Applications are due in late fall for study abroad the following summer or academic year. Note: The application deadline for this year has been extended to February 15, 2014.