Asian language courses preferred by students globally as K-pop culture steers interest away from ‘dead white men’
- Students are turning away from European languages to study Korean, Chinese and Japanese
- This reflects the cultural interest in South Korea and the growing economic importance of Asian countries
Yumeng Zhuang fell in love with physics and philosophy as a high school student in China. That passion led her to Albert Einstein and Immanuel Kant – and then to a desire to study German so she could read their works as originally written. But her parents weren’t thrilled, pushing her to perfect her English instead.
“They said German is not a useful language because not many people speak it,” says Zhuang, a physics major at the University of California at Los Angeles. “So I started studying it secretly.”
Derided as the study of “dead white men” by some critics, European language and culture programmes have seen better days. In the economic turmoil of the pandemic, universities everywhere are turning to science and technology studies and cutting funding for many so-called liberal arts courses, including languages.
In Australia, a number of financially troubled universities, hit hard by a shortage of fee-paying international students during the Covid-19 pandemic, have considered dropping Asian and European languages thought to be both expensive and unpopular. La Trobe University in Melbourne pondered dropping Hindi and Bahasa Indonesia; Swinburne, also in Melbourne, thought about dropping all foreign languages. Murdoch University in Perth and Western Sydney University considered shutting down their Bahasa Indonesia courses.
Worldwide, European languages have been hit even harder than Asian languages, with Asian nations widely seen as the economic powerhouses of the future. Students are more likely to choose to study Korean, Japanese or Mandarin Chinese, despite their difficulty, than French, Italian or German.
