Languages in the KU Slavic Department

 

 

Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, Serbian (BCMS)

Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, Serbian—formerly known as Serbo-Croatian—are taught together at KU. Although they have all become official languages of their independent states, they remain understandable among each other.

 

 

Czech

Czech is the language spoken by about 10 million citizens of the Czech Republic and another 2 million or so worldwide. Czech is a Slavic language from the West-Slavic group, which also includes Polish and Slovak.

 

 

Polish

Polish language, rich in its history and literature, is spoken by more than 40 million speakers. The University of Kansas has a more than thirty-year tradition of teaching Polish language and literature.

 

 

Persian (Farsi/ Tajik)

Persian, an Indo-European language with a rich cultural and literary history, enjoys the status of official language in three countries: Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan where it is locally known as Farsi, Dari and Tajiki respectively.

 

 

Russian

Russian is spoken by upwards of 170 million people in Russia, a country that covers one eighth of the world’s landmass and that spans eleven time zones across Europe and Asia.

 

 

Slovene

Slovene is spoken by approximately 2 m. people in the Republic of Slovenia and neighboring territories in Italy, Austria, and Hungary. Large Slovene-speaking communities can also be found in Argentina, Australia, Canada, and the US. KU is the only major North American university that teaches Slovene at all levels.

 

 

Turkish

Turkish is spoken by roughly 150 million people all around the world. Like Finnish and Hungarian, Turkish is an agglutinative language, which means that new particles are added to the end of a base form to generate new words.

 

 

Ukrainian

Ukrainian is an East Slavic language and is part of the larger Indo-European family of languages. It is spoken in Ukraine and in Ukrainian communities in neighboring Belarus, Russia, Poland, and Slovakia.

 

 

Yiddish

Yiddish is the erstwhile lingua franca of East-European (Ashkenazi) Jews and now spoken by Hasidic Jews and some traditional communities in Israel and elsewhere. The main stock of the Yiddish lexicon is German, but there are many Hebrew, Aramaic, Romance and Slavic elements.