MANILA — Harvard University will soon offer a course on Tagalog, the fourth most spoken language in the United States, according to a report in the student paper Harvard Crimson.
The university’s Department of South Asian Studies will hire three instructors to teach Tagalog, Bahasa Indonesia, and Thai for the academic year 2023 to 2024, the report said.
Teaching positions under a three-year term appointment and renewable for up to five additional years will be supported by a $1-million budget secured through fundraising initiatives, it added.
James Robson, a professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations and director of Harvard’s Asia Center, said the department had been working toward expanding education about Southeast Asia in the university for more than two years.
Through the Tagalog course, he said the Harvard department hoped to demonstrate the demand for Southeast Asian languages, and “hopefully we can also use this to convince the administration to further support Southeast Asian studies.”
Tagalog is one of the major languages in the Philippines, from which the national language, Filipino, is largely derived. Filipino and English are the country’s two official languages.
Eleanor Wikstrom, co-president of the Harvard Philippine Forum (HPF) and Crimson editorial chair, said getting the Tagalog language offered at the university had been one of the group’s goals.
HPF is a community of Filipinos, Filipino Americans, and friends who celebrate and share the importance of Philippine culture and tradition within Harvard. (Jane Bautista © Philippine Daily Inquirer)
