For students attending the five colleges of the Pioneer Valley, studying of foreign languages such as Spanish, French or Chinese has always been a sought after subject. But what if a student wants to study the national language of Kazakhstan? Or one of the major Indigenous languages spoken across the African continent, like Amharic or Wolof?

The idea of ensuring that students within the consortium of UMass Amherst and the colleges of Amherst, Smith, Mount Holyoke and Hampshire could be free to study any of languages they desired is the goal of the Five College Center for World Languages, first founded in 1991 and located at the Amherst College campus.

“At that time, the deans of the five colleges came together and saw that there was a real interest among their students in studying languages,” said Janna White, the center’s current director. “So the deans wanted to make as many languages available for study as possible while also recognizing that it wasn’t really possible or sustainable to have a full-fledged campus department for every single language that students are interested in.”

Now, that goal has expanded with a recent $85,000 grant from the Davis Educational Foundation founded by Stanton Davis, the former chairman of Shaw’s Supermarkets, and his wife Elisabeth. The grant will be used by the language center to update its website, allowing users with greater ease of access for the site’s currently existing resources.

“We submitted an application earlier this spring and we’re very grateful to get a generous award from them to support this work,” White said. “[The website] is a pretty static structure right now, and this will be the next phase to allow the materials that are already there to go to better use, and a more effective container for more resources to come.”

The center’s website, known as LangMedia, currently lists 49 languages with available resources, from Albanian to Zulu. Selecting a language will provide a link to various videos and lessons focusing on aspects of everyday life, such as greetings, dining and transportation services, with additional coursework available for students of the five colleges who chose to enroll. According to White, 31 of those languages had at least one student enrolled in coursework.

The center works following an independent study model, where a specialized course is designed for students who express interest in learning a select language. The center also arranges for native speakers of the language to connect with the student, allowing them to practice conversation. The model allows a litany of lesser-taught languages to be available on demand, without the need to constantly maintain a specific program.

“Kazakh is a great example, where it’s not a language we had offered before,” said White, referring to the official language of the Central Asian country of Kazakhstan. “But this last year, we had a student come forward and say they were interested in studying it. And so we did the work to put together a curriculum and found an Amherst College student who is a Kazakh speaker, and we were able to offer Kazakh for the first time.”

With the update of the LangMedia website through the foundation grant, expected to be completed in January, the center hopes to provide greater accessibility for users who might be interested in one of the languages listed. Video dialogues on the site are small in size, with transcripts only available in a .doc file format rather than the more commonly used .pdf files.

“A lot of what’s on the site is currently going underutilized because of some of the limitations of the site’s structure,” White said. “That’s one of our main goals in this first phase of the project, to enhance the kind of discovery and usability of our existing materials.”

Once the current site is updated, the center will look to add even more content to its collection of language resources.

“Our hope is that in the near future, we will also be able to begin to add new resources and augment what’s currently there,” White said.

Alexander MacDougall can be reached at amacdougall@gazettenet.com.