The Department of Spanish and Portuguese offers a wide variety of undergraduate courses from basic language instruction in Spanish and Portuguese to more advanced classes in literature, culture, and film. Spanish is, by some estimates, the third most widely spoken language in the world today after Mandarin Chinese and English. It is also the first language of many of our country’s 37 million US Latinos. Less recognized is the global importance of the Portuguese language, estimated to be the seventh most widely spoken language (ahead of both French and German) with millions of speakers in Brazil, Africa, and Portugal.