New Language Department Reflects Changing Demographics

Rutgers Creates Department of African, Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Literatures

Richard Serrano, associate professor of French, will serve as the first AMESALL chair.  The department also will consist of two tenured faculty members, Ousseina Alidou, currently the director of the Program in African Languages, and Alamin Mazrui, a linguist of African languages at Rutgers, and four faculty members: Paul Sprachman, Charles Haberl, Moha Ennaji, and Mohamed Alsiadi.

For more information, go to sas.rutgers.edu and see below:

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Reasons for Creating the Department of African, Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Literature

Logically Grouping Language Instruction

• The people of Africa, the Middle East and South Asia have engaged in historical exchanges stretching back to antiquity. All three regions border the Indian Ocean and have long-standing mercantile, religious and cultural ties.
  
  

• When fully developed, the department will offer at least 10 languages – including Arabic, Bengali, Hindi, Hausa, Persian, Swahili, Turkish, Urdu, Yoruba and Zulu. Grouping these languages in one department recognizes the historical cross-fertilization among the cultures that inhabit the three regions.
  
  

• Some of the languages co-exist within a region and a cultural sphere (e.g., Hausa, Swahili, Yoruba, Zulu), while others serve as linguistic and cultural bridges between regions (e.g., Arabic). Persian and Urdu share significant linguistic ties that highlight historic cultural interactions between Iran and South Asia.
  
  

 Response to Changing Demographics

• The changing demographic landscape in New Jersey has increased the demand for instruction in the languages of Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.
  
  

• Many of the students enrolled in African language courses are in fact “heritage language learners,” who have special linguistic and instructional needs. These American citizens are the children of the rising population of immigrants. They grow up with some knowledge of, but are not fluent and literate in, the heritage language of their study.
  
  
• With the right kind of instructional approaches, heritage learners are likely to succeed in developing a command of the language at a level essential for professional transactions, international trade and national security – invaluable skills for an increasingly global world.

 
Serving Students Better

• After surveying universities throughout the nation, Rutgers observed that students accomplished a higher proficiency in African languages when the programs were housed in departments that specialized in linguistics and languages.
  
  

• Higher education offers the first opportunity for most students of Arabic, Yoruba, Hindi and other less commonly taught languages to receive formal education in such languages.
  
  

Media Contact: Nicole Pride
732-932-7084, ext. 610
E-mail: npride@ur.rutgers.edu