Leah Henson still remembers the moment she made a fool of herself in front of her Italian professor.
In her first weeks studying the language, a familiar word appeared on the classroom board: Bologna.
"Oh my gosh, that's bologna," she said, thinking of the lunch meat. Henson, now a second-year Italian student, said her teacher then looked at her like she had two heads.
The city in northern Italy shares its spelling with the American deli staple — though the two have different pronunciations. Despite the embarrassment, the mix-up became one of Henson's favorite stories to tell.
Hundreds of students filled the Global and International Studies Building on Friday for the third annual Language Fest, where students heard dozens of languages through short lessons and conversations with instructors. Samson Lotven, senior associate director of student success at the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies, organized the event.
He said the event’s ultimate goal is to get students talking to instructors early before they commit to a semester of a language they know little about.
According to the HLS website, almost 70 languages are taught at IU, including over the summer in the Summer Language Workshop. Numbers vary from semester to semester.
"I've heard anything from 50-plus to 60-plus to 70-plus to 80-plus languages," Lotven said. "It's likely more languages than anywhere else in the U.S."
Rebecca Manring, director of language instruction for the IU Dhar India Studies Program, said those learning languages gain a community with it.
"We're all human beings living on this shrinking planet,” Manring said. “And if we can communicate with each other, if we understand not just each other's languages but our cultures, we're less likely to fight."
Narges Nematollahi, a Persian lecturer in the HLS Department of Central Eurasian Studies, said culture and language cannot be separated from each other in her classroom.
"You cannot teach language without teaching the culture," Nematollahi said. "You come to class, you learn a language and you learn the whole culture — be it food culture, art culture, architecture, the way that people interact with each other."
For some students, Language Fest changed their academic paths.
Krishna Kopalle, a sophomore majoring in international law and Middle Eastern languages and cultures, said last year's Language Fest is the reason she started learning Persian, in addition to Arabic — a language she’s studied for four years. Before coming to IU, she said she swore off learning new languages after high school.
Sophomore Dakarnevaeh Robinson enrolled in Korean this semester after stopping by the event. Robinson, a computational linguistics major with a minor in East Asian languages and cultures, said IU's linguistics program drew her to the university in the first place.
"I'm a language nerd," Robinson said. "I would love to learn about all the languages."
But Nematollahi may have to scale back some aspects of her teaching. She said state budget cuts have already affected what she can offer Persian students outside the classroom.
In her first year at IU, she said, funding allowed her to pay a doctoral student to help run Persian conversation hours. That funding is no longer available.
She said she is searching for outside donations to keep cultural programming alive. Without it, she said, students' experience with the language "will be only limited to what they learn in classroom."
Lotven noted a longer-running challenge being a decline in class cultural activities and program exposure taking a hit. Indiana’s most recent budget bill requires the state’s public universities to review degree programs graduating too few students, with minimum thresholds ranging from three graduates a year for doctoral programs to 15 for bachelor's degrees.
By April 2026, Indiana's public colleges had eliminated, suspended or merged nearly 580 programs statewide, with IU absorbing the largest share of any single school.
Former HLS Dean John Ciorciari confirmed in a video that some of the university's degrees are changing as a result of the legislation, though students already enrolled will be able to finish their current degrees.
Even with the uncertainty, interest in language study hasn't disappeared. Lotven said he has spent the past year asking job recruiters why they seek out language majors. He has not landed on one answer but keeps coming back to the same theme.
"The number 1 thing in language learning is wanting to be understood and to understand," Lotven said. "Our brains do all kinds of work without us even actively doing anything if we're just trying, if we want to interact with people."
Nematollahi said the turnout at this year's Language Fest was one of the best she has seen in her three years attending. But she didn’t think about the size of the crowd when she left. "It was not just visitors who passed by," Nematollahi said. "There was real, genuine interest."
