The Faculty of Humanities of Eötvös Loránd University maintains a diverse and wide-ranging network of international relations. The foreign language departments of the Faculty (School of English and American Studies, the Institutes of Germanic Studies,Oriental Studies, Far Eastern Studies, Romance Studies, and Slavonic and Baltic Philology) are in constant scientific dialogue with the universities and research institutions of the target cultures/regions, and thus are active members of the international scientific community. This enables both the teachers and the students to stay up-to-date with the results of ongoing research of their chosen language/culture.

The Faculty of Humanities has a long and rich history of welcoming students from all corners of the world. Over the years thousands of international students have graduated from the Faculty of Humanities and gone on to pursue successful careers in their selected fields.

Our website in English seeks to (1) provide information about the extensive international portfolio that the Faculty can offer and (2) guide future students through the application process.

The other institutes maintain close ties with foreign institutions, as well, which not only facilitate the exchange of information and the realization of joint projects, but also teacher, researcher and student exchange. This enables our academic staff to stay within in the international mainstream of scientific research.

The Faculty of Humanities maintains active relations with more than fifty universities worldwide. Besides the traditional connections to prestigious European institutions – the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich, the Sorbonne University in Paris or theUniversity of Bristol, for example – the last years have seen a strengthening of relations with the universities of Far Eastern countries (China, Japan, Korea, and India) and those of the Americas, Africa and Australia. This entails the increasing acclaim of our Faculty worldwide, which results in the growing number of foreign students who engage in full- or part-time studies at our institutions at all levels. Recent years have seen a substantial increase in the ratio of Far Eastern students, and we expect the same to happen to the number of students from the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking countries of South-America. These guest-students will engage in short- or long-term studies together with the students from all over the European Union, who due to the unified credit-conversion policy of the Bologna system are able to pursue parts of their studies at our Faculty.

Student mobility and cooperation programs (Erasmus, Erasmus Mundusand CEEPUS ), on the other hand, ensure that our students engage in studies abroad by lending them financial support to present them with the possibility to spend one semester – in special cases longer than that – at a partner institution. Our Faculty ranks first in the number of students (more than 200 during 2008) who could study abroad in the course of an exchange program.

The Faculty of Humanities have always considered it their priority to introduce other languages and cultures to the Hungarian public by hosting foreign university or cultural institutions,like the inter-university French Center, the Budapest Language Center of the Portuguese Camoes Institute, the Gallego Language Center or the Confucius Center. These institutions complement the academic and educational work of the Faculty with their diverse cultural programs.

Languages at the Faculty of Humanities

In addition to classical and Western philology, Hungarian literature and history, liberal arts, social studies and musicology, the Faculty of Humanities places particular emphasis on education in foreign languages. In order to guarantee the highest level of teaching languages, literatures and cultures at our modern philology programs, the Faculty of Humanities has maintained and expanded its relations with illustrious European, Asian and American universities. Our researchers and instructors have been in contact with these institutions for decades, where they have conducted scholarly and pedagogical work. These connections have enabled the Faculty of Humanities to teach 60 languages and cultures at a level that reflects the high quality and academic excellence of our research institution.

The languages taught at the Faculty are as follows: Estonian, Finnish, English, Irish, German, Dutch (Flemish), Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, French, Italian, Portuguese of Portugal, Portuguese of Brazil, Spanish, Catalan, Galego, Basque, Romanian, Albanian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Serbian, Slovenian, Macedonian, Czech, Polish, Slovakian, Sorbian, Russian, Ukrainian, Ruthenian, Byelorussian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Akkadian, Classical Syriac, Coptic, Sumerian, Semite and cuneiform languages, Ancient Egyptian, Classical Hebrew, Ancient Greek, Latin, Arabian, Modern Hebrew, Yiddish, Hindi, Sanskrit, Classical Persian, Modern Persian, Japanese, Classical Chinese, Modern Chinese, Korean, Classical  Mongolian, Modern Mongolian (Halha), Classical Tibetan,  Modern Tibetan, Ottoman Turkish, Turkish, Georgian, Romaic, and Vietnamese. The languages taught at different institutes and departments of the Faculty of Humanities represent great intellectual and relational assets, the importance of which reaches beyond the frame of research and education.

Our instructors play a significant role in the present political, economic and cultural discourse with their command of languages and their related knowledge about culture and civilization. In this manner, through their connections and local knowledge, they may indirectly take a prominent part in providing the means for the dissemination of Hungarian language, literature and culture beyond the borders of Hungary. This broad range of language and cultural programs seeks to satisfy the needs of professions which are not strictly related to what one considers as the study of humanities in a traditional sense; therefore, students who have completed the first or second tier of the Bologna Process will be able to succeed in these fields as well.

Institutes of Language Education at the Faculty of Humanities

These forms of cooperation, predominant in the areas of academic research and education, are complemented by our Faculty’s lecturers, departments, and the university institutes initiated, organised and operated by foreign partners; for example, the Camões Institute of Budapest (1995), the Galego Language Resource Centre (2000), the Aula Cervantes which operated between 2001 and 2004, and the Confucius Institute (2006). These institutes help various languages and their related cultures reach beyond the walls of the university, and thus, with their function of conveying information, further raise the prestige of the Faculty of Humanities in the dissemination of foreign languages, literatures and cultures.