Finnish Language & Culture | University of California, Berkeley

Scandinavian Studies at Berkeley

Helsinki Cathedral

The Department of Scandinavian offers language courses in Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, and Swedish. The Department is particularly interested in helping students pursue interdisciplinary interests through its own core courses and through double majors with other fields. Several of the areas in which Scandinavia is of comparative interest or has made a major contribution are history, drama, medieval literature, folklore, architecture, public policy, linguistics, international studies, peace studies, political science, film, economics, and environmental studies.

Although taken singly, the Scandinavian countries are relatively small in population (Sweden at 8.5 million; Denmark, 5 million; Norway, 4 million; Finland, 5 million, Iceland, 250,000), they form as a whole a common linguistic and cultural community of some size. With the exception of Icelandic (a 'frozen' language perhaps more like Anglo-Saxon than the other modern Scandinavian languages) and Finnish (which belongs to the Finno-Ugric language group), the Scandinavian languages are similar and mutually comprehensible. Knowledge of Norwegian brings with it a fair understanding of Danish and Swedish, and so on. To learn one is thus to gain access to Scandinavia in general.

The curriculum emphasizes especially those moments when Scandinavia's 'cultural borrowing' turned to 'cultural lending'; the latter include the Viking Age, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (an era of military and scientific preeminence), the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (a period of literary preeminence, especially in theater), and the mid-twentieth century (social ideology, in particular the design of the 'Welfare State' and, in the case of Sweden, the pursuit of political neutrality). Specific courses take up the history, literature, folklore, and film of these periods of Scandinavian prominence in Western Europe's cultural production.

The Department features a distinguished, active faculty and a lively mix of graduate and undergraduate students. Students often pursue study abroad to further their language acquisition and cultural understanding. Please visit our Departmental website (link below) for more detailed information.