The article is devoted to the study of the use of languages for describing the architecture of systems in software development projects. The purpose of the article is to stimulate the interest of university teachers in the use of these lan-guages in the disciplines of computer science. To this end, using the example of the standard ISO / IEC / IEEE 12207: 2017 “Software life cycle processes”, the usefulness of using languages is shown not only for the process of defining the archi-tecture, but also for other technical processes. Consideration is carried out on the example of ArchiMate 3.1 - one of the most laconic languages of architectural description. The language contains 41 basic symbols, 19 additional and 13 types of links. The language allows you to describe almost all the technical processes of the software life cycle. Examples of de-scriptions are provided for the business or mission analysis process, the process for determining the needs and requirements of stakeholders, the process for determining the system / software requirements. In the future, the ArchiMate language can become the language of communication between enterprise managers, system analysts, system engineers, system architects and software developers. Students in IT areas are offered the ArchiMate language for studying, as well as the free, open source and cross-platform Archi tool. Along with the coArchi extension, it provides team development and versioning of generated definitions.