As U.S. forces geared up to enter Somalia in 1992, urgent word arrived at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, Calif., that the military needed speakers of Somali.
At the institute, America's foremost language teaching facility, "We put out an all-points bulletin: Does anyone know this language?" recalls Paul Bannes, who teaches Russian there. "In all the U.S. armed forces, there was only one person who knew Somali. He was found on the East Coast and immediately flown to our institute, where overnight he worked to compile a one-page pamphlet of must-know Somali, with pronunciations, for soldiers going into the country."
This is not how the greatest country in the world should be doing business, yet in the days after Sept. 11, we went through the same drill. It hasn't been pretty. Seeing the director of the FBI go on TV to beg for speakers of Arabic -- not to mention less-common tongues such as the Afghan languages Dari, Pashto and Baluchi -- was nothing short of pathetic.
This weekend, thousands of foreign language teachers gathered in Washington for their annual meeting, and I'm pleased to report that our struggling restaurants got a nice boost. But I didn't see much cause for optimism on the language front.
Only 8 percent of U.S. college students study a language. Of those, only 10 percent pick a tongue other than Spanish, French or German. And not even 10 percent of language students ever achieve functional proficiency in it.
The numbers on Arabic are shocking: Only 4,300 U.S. students were studying the language in 1998, says John Eisele, president of the American Association of Teachers of Arabic and a professor at William and Mary. Sure, enrollment in beginning Arabic courses zoomed this fall; at Princeton University, the number tripled. But it takes three years to reach fluency in that difficult a language, and "almost nobody reaches the level of proficiency the government needs in the military and intelligence," says Richard Brecht, director of the National Foreign Language Center at the University of Maryland. "We always find ourselves in this situation because our education system is market driven."
At the convention, U.S. publishers hawked their wares -- snazzy textbooks, cutting-edge computer programs, movies -- but product lines were limited almost entirely to Spanish, French, German and a bit of Italian. Japanese and Chinese companies pushed their languages with attractive products. But if there was a single Arabic book or tape in the vast hall, I couldn't find it.
The market just doesn't work for what teachers call "less-commonly-taught" languages. So the government subsidizes those courses, pumping money, for example, into Russian instruction after the Soviet Union launched its first Sputnik rocket in 1957. But when the U.S. Embassy in Iran was taken over in 1979, none of our staff there spoke Farsi, Brecht says. He adds that when we discovered terrorists' plans in Arabic after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, "we didn't process the information for months because we didn't have the people."
Other countries have refused to accept this. Australia, deciding it had to have closer ties with Asia, dramatically boosted language teaching. Britain is doing that now to integrate itself with Europe. Here at home, every time a world crisis develops, we're reduced to scouring the nation for skills.
At the convention, the Defense Language Institute sought to fill immediate positions in Afghan and Pakistani languages. "The fact is we don't have a sure-fire formula for finding capable instructors of less-commonly-taught languages," Bannes said.
There are rumblings on the Hill about more federal support. But "it will take more than talk," says Pat Barr-Harrison, foreign language supervisor in the Prince George's County schools. "You have to do a big marketing job with young adolescents to attract them to these less-common languages. That's hard to do if all the teaching materials are designed for adults. Arabic and those other languages don't have the stimulating materials that grab a student when they walk into a room."
Karin Larson, of the University of Minnesota, adds, "Even if the student expresses interest, what happens is the parents say, 'No, Spanish is a more useful language.' "
Not today it isn't.
E-mail: marcfisher@washpost.com
