Spanish and Portuguese

Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Oxford gives you access to two of the most widely spoken languages in the world, sharing Romance roots but diverging through centuries of separate imperial, literary, and political histories. Spanish is the official language of more than twenty countries and is spoken by hundreds of millions of people across Latin America, Spain, and the United States. Portuguese carries its own extraordinary reach, from the European heartland of Portugal to Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, and the scattered remnants of a global empire, making it one of the most geographically distributed languages on earth.

Together they open an enormous range of literary, historical, and cultural material, and studying both allows you to trace the connections and divergences between two closely related but distinctive traditions.

The four-year full-time programme at Oxford is shaped by the tutorial system, in which intensive one-to-one or small-group sessions with specialists in each language and tradition form the core of your intellectual development. You will reach a high level of proficiency in both languages, working across literary, historical, and contemporary material. In Spanish you will engage with literature from medieval Iberia through the Golden Age to the twentieth-century Latin American novel and contemporary writing.

In Portuguese you will study the literature of Portugal and Brazil, the distinctive traditions of each country's cultural production, and the historical and political contexts in which they developed. Translation, close reading, and critical argument are all central to how the programme develops your abilities.

Graduates pursue careers in the civil service, international organisations, law, finance, diplomacy, journalism, translation and interpreting, academia, and cultural institutions. Many continue to doctoral research in Spanish or Portuguese studies, or in comparative literature. The breadth of linguistic reach these languages provide is matched by the intellectual depth that Oxford's tutorial method develops.