Yale University to offer Tagalog course in fall 2025
Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut will be offering courses in Tagalog in the fall of 2025.
This came months after Tagalog @ Yale, an initiative within Yale’s Filipinx club Kasama, formalized their student advocacy in the fall of 2023.
Hence, the Council on Southeast Asian Studies at the university is looking for a Filipino (Tagalog) lecturer to teach the upcoming courses.
According to the Yale Daily News, one of the US’ oldest college daily newspapers, the Filipino (Tagalog) lecturer will be assigned for three years, with the potential of renewal, and will teach six courses each year.
Similarly, the lector will collaborate with other educators in the Vietnamese and Indonesian languages to enhance the university's Southeast Asian Studies offerings, including study abroad opportunities.
Before this, they had the Directed Independent Language Study, an earlier program that allowed students in the university to study Filipino (Tagalog) without receiving course credit; instead, it paired them with native speakers of the language.
Being the fourth most-spoken language in the US, some students think the program may need more structure and think they would learn more in a credit-bearing class.
“Tagalog is the fourth most-spoken language in the US,” Janina Gbenoba ’27, a Kasama member active in the initiative, told the Yale Daily News, adding that she "strongly" believes that Filipinos should have a place at the university.
She added, “So we feel very strongly about it having a place at Yale, both for members of Yale’s Filipino community and because we really do believe that even people outside of the Filipino culture would have an interest in studying it.”
Interested applicants in the university’s lector position for the Tagalog course may know more about the job and apply here.
Harvard University also began offering a Tagalog course in March 2023, with Cavite teacher Lady Aileen Orsal getting hired to teach months later.