Foreign language and literature is a characteristic subject with traditional advantages in Beijing Foreign Studies University.

At present, the school offers English, Russian, French, German, Japanese, Spanish, Arabic, Italian, Swedish, Portuguese, Cambodian, Vietnamese, Lao, Burmese, Thai, Indonesian, Malay, Sinhala, Turkish, Korean, Swahili, Hausa, Polish and Vietnamese. There are 43 foreign language courses in Ukrainian, Dutch, Hindi, Urdu, Persian, Hebrew, Norwegian, Icelandic, Danish, Greek, Filipino and Persian, among which 1 1 language is the only subject in China.