Italian is a Romance language with approximately 70 million speakers. Italy is the UK’s 6th largest non-English speaking export market worth more than £17 billion to the UK economy (2015). Trade-in services with Italy have grown by 78% since 2012. Whilst Italy is the UK’s 8th largest source of imports, only 1% of UK companies have staff with sufficient Italian language ability to conduct business.
Italy is also the 3rd most popular overseas destination for UK tourists, with approximately 4 million annual visits (2015). Italian is a popular language among adult learners. There are close to 26,000 UK nationals resident in Italy, and some 124,000 native-Italian speakers resident in the UK.
At Durham, we offer Italian from beginners to advanced levels to develop students’ linguistic potential and cultural understanding.