The Department offers languages spoken by nearly 40% of the world's population, including four critical languages designated by the US National Security Education Program—Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Russian—and area studies of increasingly important regions of Asia and Russia in the 21st century. It is not a coincidence that the enrollment has been growing in recent decades.

The Department has strengths in 1) critical language education, which has empowered students receiving major external awards and being highly competitive in the job market after graduation, 2) research in language acquisition, applied linguistics, translation, culture, literature, literary history, history of the book, and creative writing, which has brought impact to the relevant academic fields nationally and internationally, and 3) obtaining major external grants which have made our major programs in the Department a signature program in the field.