Italian and Spanish

Studying Italian and Spanish together at Oxford brings you into contact with two of the great literary and cultural traditions of the European world, both rooted in Latin and yet distinct in their histories, their aesthetics, and their global reach. Italian takes you from Dante and the Renaissance humanists through to the literature of the Risorgimento and the twentieth-century innovations of writers and filmmakers who shaped how the modern world thinks about art, politics, and memory. Spanish opens onto an extraordinarily diverse set of literary and cultural spaces, from medieval Iberia and the Golden Age of Cervantes and Lope de Vega to the literatures of Latin America, with all their range and vitality.

At Oxford, this four-year programme gives you deep grounding in both languages, training you to read, write, and converse with precision and confidence, as well as to engage with literary and cultural texts in an analytically rigorous way. You will study linguistics alongside literature, examining how the two languages work, how they have changed over time, and how they relate to one another and to their shared Latin roots. Critical theory, film, and the history of ideas are all part of the intellectual landscape you will inhabit.

Entry to the programme is highly competitive, typically requiring a tariff of around 184 points.

Oxford language graduates are known for their analytical ability, their cultural range, and their capacity for sustained and precise argument. Careers include roles in diplomacy, international organisations, journalism, publishing, the law, education, business development in European and Latin American markets, and the civil service. Many graduates continue to postgraduate study in literature, linguistics, area studies, or translation.

The combination of two major world languages studied at the highest level provides a genuinely distinctive foundation for almost any career with an international dimension.