Institute of Asian and African Countries

The Institute of Asian and African Countries at Lomonosov Moscow State University was founded in 1956 as the Institute of Oriental Languages and was renamed to the Institute of Asian and African Countries in 1972. It is a Russian Centre for Oriental Studies. It employs more than 250 members including 28 professors and 70 assistant professors. Many of them are authors of studies, text-books and dictionaries for their translations of Japanese, Chinese, Sanskrit, Arabic, Hindi, Persian, Malay, Swahili and other Asian and African texts of fiction. Nowadays many Asian and African languages are taught in the Institute including Indonesian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Thai, Mongolian, Arabic, Sinhalese, Turkish, Hebrew, Urdu, Sanskrit, Swahili, Hausa, Amharic, Afrikaans, Fula and Zulu.