French and Persian and Spanish

Studying three languages together, French, Spanish, and Persian, is one of the most ambitious and rewarding pathways in language education. French and Spanish together open access to dozens of countries across Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Persian, one of the great classical languages of the world, gives access to the literary and cultural traditions of Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan, and to a rich heritage of poetry, philosophy, and scholarship that stretches back more than a millennium.

The combination is genuinely distinctive, spanning Western European modernity and a major Asian cultural tradition simultaneously.

At St Andrews you will develop high-level proficiency in French and Spanish alongside study of Persian language, literature, and culture, at a level appropriate to your prior experience. All three languages are approached through their literatures, histories, and cultural contexts as well as through language training, so that you develop not just communicative competence but genuine intellectual engagement with three different ways of understanding the world. The four-year MA (Hons) programme includes a year abroad, which is an especially important element of a trilingual degree, giving you the opportunity to spend extended time in a French, Spanish, or Persian-speaking environment and develop your skills through immersion.

Graduates with this combination of languages are genuinely unusual in the job market. Careers in diplomacy, international organisations, translation and interpreting, journalism, international business, the civil service, teaching, and cultural relations organisations are all open to those with high-level language skills across three major world languages. Many students continue to postgraduate study in linguistics, translation, area studies, or international relations.