Attitudes towards Italian and career opportunities: perspectives of Italian and non-Italian language majors at the University of Jordan

This article examines attitudes toward Italian among language majors at a Jordanian university. It addresses a gap in language-attitudes research in Jordan and the wider Arab region, where scholarly attention has focused mainly on English, Arabic-English bilingualism, and English-medium education, while Languages Other Than English remain comparatively underexamined. Italian provides a productive case because it is strongly associated with art, fashion, music, cuisine, heritage, and refinement, yet its local labour-market value is less clearly visible than that of English. Drawing on an archived survey of 300 undergraduates, including 150 Italian-English majors and 150 students from other language programmes, the study examines how students evaluate Italian across two domains: cultural-symbolic value and perceived career utility. The findings show that non-Italian majors associate Italian strongly with beauty, rhythm, fashion, heritage, and cultural distinction, whereas Italian majors express more ambivalent evaluations when employability and future value are foregrounded. The article argues that Italian's challenge in Jordanian higher education is not lack of prestige, but the limited conversion of symbolic value into visible academic and professional pathways.