Welcome to French and Italian at OSU!

Why study French?

• For an extended period of time during the late Middle Ages, French was the language of the English court and heavily influenced English.
• In the 17th-18th centuries, French replaced Latin as the language of international diplomacy and commerce; since the beginning of the 20th century, it has shared that role with several other languages, including English.
• French is spoken by some 500 million people around the world, including 2.5 million people in the US.
• French is spoken as a first or second language in 50 countries and is one of the official languages in Canada, Belgium, Switzerland, Luxembourg, and several African countries.
• French is the second most frequently used language on the Internet.
• France and francophone countries have a very rich and influential historical, cultural, and literary legacy.
• The US is the largest investor in France.
• France is one of the three largest investors in the US.
• France has the fourth largest economy in the world after the US, Japan, and Germany.
• France provides more foreign aid per capita than any other country except Japan.
• France plays a major international role in medicine and science; for instance, the greater Paris area has the highest concentration of mathematicians in the world.
• Knowing French gives you access to the numerous specialized publications in French in fields such as business, science, technology, medicine, and the arts.
• Knowing French gives you access to all the French cultural materials such as French newspapers, magazines and films.
• Knowing French gives you access to the literature and cinema of France and the Francophone world.

Why study Italian?

• Italy has been at the center of the artistic and cultural history of the western world for over two thousand years.
• Italian is spoken by more than 70 million people residing all over the world.
• In the northern hemisphere, there are more than 10 million descendants of immigrants from Italy living in countries from Canada to Argentina.
• Since Italian is derived from Latin, knowledge of Italian will help you to understand the English language, which has a very large percentage of words derived from Latin.
• Italy has played a major role in the development of Western music; the terminology and the art of opera came from Italy.
• Italy was a charter member of NATO and the European Economic Community (EEC); it has been at the forefront of European economic and political unification, joining the European Monetary Union in 1999.
• Italy holds a strategic geographic location and dominates the central Mediterranean as well as southern sea and air approaches to Western Europe.
• Italy has a diversified industrial economy with roughly the same total and per capita output as France and the UK.
• Italy draws thirty million tourists per year; cultural cities of attraction include Florence, Venice, Rome, Milan, Padua, Pisa, Bologna, and Turin.
• Italian is a scientific language and may be teamed with physical sciences and mathematics.
• Italian Nobel Prize winners include physical scientist Enrico Fermi, inventor Guglielmo Marconi, and cancer researcher Renato Dulbecco.
• Italian astronomer, Galileo, created the telescope, discovered the satellites of Jupiter, and investigated the laws of oscillation of the pendulum.
• Knowing Italian gives you access to masterpieces of Italian literature, opera and cinema.

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