corrections on data in previous posting

[Benjamin Rifkin]

Dear SEELANGers:

I apologize for misquoting the NY Times article to which Genevra Gerhardt
referred.  In fact, "other languages" experienced a whopping 42% increase
in enrollments, from 17,544 in 1990 to 24,918 in 1995, compared to a 36%
increase for Chinese, a 28% increase for Arabic, a 14% increase for
Spanish, a 5% increase for Portuguese, a 1% increase for Hebrew and
decreases in Ancient Greek (1%), Japanese (2%), Latin (8%), Italian (12%),
French (25%), German (28%) and Russian (45%).  According to these
enrollment figures, the most popular languages and their enrollments in
1995 are:

Spanish                  606,286
French                    205,351
German                   96,263
Japanese                  44,723
Italian                      43,760
Chinese                   26,471
Latin                        25,897
Russian                   24,729 (down from 44,626 in 1990)
Ancient Greek      16,272
Hebrew                  13,127
Portuguese             6,531
Arabic                      4,444

Other languages registered enrollments of 17,544 in 1990 and 24,918 in 1995.

In 1990, Russian was the 6th most popular foreign language (after Spanish,
French, German, Italian and Japanese, in that order).  In 1995, Russian was
the 8th most popular foreign language.  Chinese passed Russian and Russian
fell behind Latin (which also experienced a decline in enrollment, but a
relatively slight one.)

The article is on p. B8 of the NY Times for 10/9/96 and the data are from
the MLA's survey of foreign language enrollments in 1990 in 2,772 two- and
four-year colleges in the US.



Ben Rifkin


**********************************
Benjamin Rifkin
Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures
University of Wisconsin-Madison
1432 Van Hise Hall, 1220 Linden Drive, Madison, WI  53706
(608) 262-1623; fax (608) 265-2814
e-mail:  brifkin at facstaff.wisc.edu