Americans and foreign languages
Did you know that fewer than 1% of American high school students study Arabic, Chinese, Farsi, Japanese, Korean, Russian or Urdu.

• Three hundred million Chinese are learning English. Meanwhile, only 34,000 American college students are studying Chinese.
• Roughly 10,000 American college students are studying Arabic, but only 300 (or 3 percent) reach advanced level in Arabic each year. Of the 1,000 people who work at the US Embassy in Baghdad, only 33 speak Arabic, and only six of them speak it fluently.

English has become the language of international business, science, politics, and the Internet. While the world understands us, we do not understand the world. People all over the world have access to our literature, intelligence, technical manuals, academic journals and our culture. But we lack the ability to do the same in other languages.

Need for people who speak critical languages
Increasing the number of Americans who are proficient in foreign languages is in the national interest. The Pentagon wants personnel who speak a second language to improve ground operations; intelligence agencies need officers who can speak critical languages; international businesses are concerned about competition with countries who have an endless supply of technically skilled workers who speak English.

Yet the American school system does little to expose its future workers, businessmen, scientists, soldiers and diplomats to foreign languages when their brains are best able to learn them -- starting in elementary school and continuing throughout the rest of the educational cycle.

Producing citizens who can communicate internationally is a task that requires the involvement of parents, educators, non-profit organizations, businesses, local school districts, states, and the federal government to make foreign languages a priority for all students, rather than elective courses for a few. Foreign languages should no longer be considered as optional. They should be treated like science and math because they are crucial for diplomacy, national security, and economic growth.

The U.S. has a number of programs aimed at increasing America’s foreign language competency at the advanced levels, such as Fulbright Critical Language Enhancement Award, and
National Flagship Language Program, but support for them has lagged for years.

The Intelligence Community (IC) needs individuals who are proficient in reading, writing, and/or speaking one or more of the following languages described on this website. Click on the language to see its description on this website. Proficiency at the ILR Level 2 (ACTFL Advanced) is the bare minimum.