Founded as a departmental honor society for French at the University of California, Berkeley in 1906, Pi Delta Phi is the oldest collegiate academic honor society for a modern foreign language in the United States. After many years as a local chapter, Pi Delta Phi reorganized and declared itself the National French Honor Society in 1920, and later chartered the Beta Chapter at the University of Southern California in 1925, and the Gamma Chapter at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1926.