Italian is a Romance language with approximately 70 million speakers. Italy is the UK’s 11th largest non-English speaking export market worth more than £16 billion to the UK economy (2022). 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.
Extracurricular courses
At Durham, we offer Italian as an evening extra-curricular course, open to Durham University students, staff and members of the public. We teach Italian from beginners to higher advanced, and seek to develop both students’ linguistic potential and their cultural understanding. Too see the levels currently on offer, please visit our course listings.
For further information on our credit-bearing modules, click here.
/prod01/prodbucket01/media/durham-university/research-/research-centres/centre-for-foreign-language-study/Italian-3--Hero.jpg)