US: Hard languages: do we need them all?

[Harold Schiffman]

Hard languages: do we need them all?

February 21, 2008
Posted by The Cookie Pusher in Diplomacy, Language, Policy.


The State Department offers a pay benefit to officers that get a 3/3
rating in any language classified as "hard" (on a scale of 0 to 5 in
speaking/reading; 0 being no ability, 5 being equivalent to an
educated, native speaker).  This includes most Asian languages, most
Slavic and Eastern European languages, and most Middle Eastern
languages.  I'm using a pretty broad brush here, because enumerating
them isn't my point. The pay benefit diplomats get is 10 percent of an
OC salary (first level of the Senior Foreign Service, equivalent in
protocol terms to a brigadier general) for the period in which you're
stationed in a country using that language.  So, for example, if you
get a 3/3 in Albanian, you get a pay bonus while in Albania, or
Kosovo, but not while posted to Spain or Washington.

There are two questions I'd like to ask (and partially answer) that I
think are directly germane to this policy:  1.) what about more
widely-spoken languages? and 2.) are all hard languages worth
learning?

More bang for the buck

My colleagues who speak Spanish will argue, not without reason, that
they can offer a lot more in the long term to the U.S. government by
their command of a widely-spoken language.  Investing in teaching
someone Spanish, and encouraging them to maintain their abilities,
pays dividends in the long term.  They can, after all, speak the
language at dozens of posts, and therefore spend less time in training
over the course of a career.  A speaker of Georgian, however, can use
the language at exactly one post.  Doesn't this utility deserve some
reward, they argue?

Payoff for 44 weeks of training

Second, are all hard languages worth the slog?  With due respect to
the national languages of our friends and allies, some languages offer
pretty diminishing returns.  Countries where English or Russian or
French or other widely-used languages are common come to mind.  Finns,
for example, are renowned for their English-language abilities, and
while I have nothing but respect for Finns, I wonder if there's a real
payoff for an officer's 44 weeks of training and a (temporary) 10
percent pay raise in that language.  And they're not the only ones:
Central Asia and the Caucasus come to mind as groups of countries
where Russian is widely used, though we train (some, not all) to speak
Kyrgyz, for example.

Now, I know pride is an issue.  I'm not trying to insult these
countries by declining to take up the challenge of mastering their
language.  But, in many of these cases, Russian (continuing the
Central Asian example) is widely used by their own foreign ministries.
 We're not insulting anyone by responding in kind, and we'll certainly
get more mileage out of a strong pool of Russian speakers than a
scattered number of Uzbek students.

You want me to study what?!

The reason to pay people to speak a hard language is, however, pretty
sound.  Learning Arabic takes a LOT of time and effort.  Devoting
around 7-8 percent of your career to the learning of one language is
asking a lot.  It must offer some incentive. So, I'm not trying to
offer too radical a suggestion when it comes to policy:  keep
rewarding hard language acquisition, but be a little more selective in
what languages we offer; not all need to be on the menu.  And, offer
more than the OYWLP (Out-Year World Language Program) to people
interested in acquiring widely-spoken languages.  This program, from
my review of recent bid lists, seems to offer the worst of the
Spanish- and French-speaking posts for people who want to (but don't
already) speak those languages.  Not speaking Spanish prior to bidding
shouldn't make officers second-class citizens in WHA's eyes, but I'm
not sure that isn't the case.

I'm still ruminating on this, and hope others will weigh in with other
ideas of how to tackle the issue.  Budgets are always a concern, and
if language pay gets on the chopping block, I certainly hope it's
managed intelligently, not simply whacked altogether.


-- http://thecookiepusher.wordpress.com/2008/02/21/hard-languages-do-we-need-them-all/
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