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Foreign Language Study Booming

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The Associated Press

Published: November 14, 2007

Foreign language courses are booming on American college campuses, a new study finds, with enrollment in Arabic more than doubling from 2002 to 2006.

The latest figures from the Modern Language Association of America, released Tuesday, reflect a major push toward internationalization on college campuses, more government support for language study and more interest from students. Over four years, total enrollment in language courses has grown 12.9 percent.

Spanish remains the most popular subject, with more than 823,000 students enrolled in courses - up 10.3 percent since 2002 and nearly four times higher than No. 2 French.

But Arabic is the fastest-growing major language, breaking the top 10 for the first time with just under 24,000 enrollments, compared with about 10,600 in 2002. The number of institutions offering Arabic has nearly doubled to 466, including both two- and four-year colleges.
Enrollments in languages such as Russian and Arabic have traditionally spiked with world events, but Karin Ryding of the MLA and a professor of Arabic at Georgetown said she thinks these increases will stick.

More than 200 less-common languages - everything from Nepali to Macedonian to Native American languages such as Crow and Blackfeet - are taught on college campuses. Enrollment in those courses is up one-third in the four years that the MLA studied.

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