Terrorism helps fuel interest in language study

[Harold F. Schiffman]

>>From the Hamilton (Ontario) Spectator,

Terrorism helps fuel interest in language study
Bare Facts

By Regina and Douglas Haggo
The Hamilton Spectator(Apr 15, 2006)

The fastest-growing spoken language being studied at U.S. colleges and
universities is Arabic. And the trend has the blessing of George W. Bush.
The U.S. president pledged this year to pour money into the teaching of
so-called strategic languages. These include Chinese and Farsi, the
majority language of Iran, as well as Arabic. The Los Angeles Times says a
number of California universities are reporting waiting lists for classes
in Arabic.

The president of the American Association of Teachers of Arabic estimates
the number of students has nearly quadrupled since 1998. The demand
increasingly comes from students with no family ties to the Islamic world,
the paper says. Hatem Bazian, who teaches Arabic at the University of
California at Berkeley, says the percentage of his students with Middle
Eastern family ties has dropped from 60 per cent to 20 per cent since
2001. The dropout rate is high, however, and the numbers are not large --
around 20,000. There are more students than that learning Chinese in
elementary school.

Security hits students

The number of foreign students applying to postgraduate programs in
American universities plummeted in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001,
terrorist attacks. In the 2003-04 academic year, for example, applications
dropped by 28 per cent. The Council of Graduate Schools says foreign
students, especially those in science and technology, had trouble getting
visas when national security was tightened after the attacks on New York
and Washington. Now the numbers have started to recover, rising by 11 per
cent this year over the previous academic year. The council's president
told the New York Times that recent changes in government policy had made
it easier to obtain visas.

The countries that send the most graduate students to U.S. universities
are India and China.

Nine months after 9/11

An epidemiologist has documented a sharp increase in premature and
low-birth-weight babies born to Arab-American women in the months
following Sept. 11, 2001.

Earlier research on black women demonstrated that stress caused by
discrimination boosted hormones to levels that are harmful to a fetus.

Diane Lauderdale of the University of Chicago wondered whether anti-Arab
feelings in the United States after the terror attacks affected
mothers-to-be of Arab descent. She used birth records from California,
where hate crimes tripled after 9/11. After identifying 15,000 mothers
with distinctively Arab surnames, she found that those who gave birth
during the six months after 9/11 were 34 per cent more likely to have a
low-birth-weight baby than those who gave birth a year earlier. Premature
births were 50 per cent more likely.

The research is published in the journal Demography.

Pregnancy as power struggle

Being pregnant is perfectly natural, but it can also be dangerous. An
estimated 529,000 women die each year around the world during pregnancy or
childbirth. And 10 million suffer injuries, infection or disability in
pregnancy or childbirth, according to the New York Times. Why doesn't
pregnancy work as well as other natural processes? David Haig, an
evolutionary biologist at Harvard University, has wrestled with this
question for years. "If you think about the heart or the kidney, they're
wonderful bits of engineering that work day in and day out for years and
years. But pregnancy is associated with all sorts of medical problems.
What's the difference?"

The difference is that pregnancy involves two (or more) individuals. And
the main reason for its frequent breakdown, Haig argues, is that mother
and fetus engage in an unconscious struggle over the nutrients she will
provide it. A word in your ear How hard is it to learn a foreign tongue?
It depends -- both on the nature of the language and on your own. The U.S.
State Department, which has to train diplomats serving around the world,
ranks languages by their difficulty for native speakers of American
English. The department's Foreign Service Institute classifies languages
in four categories, in ascending order of difficulty:

Category 1: Danish, Dutch, French, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese,
Romanian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish.

Category 2: Bulgarian, Dari, German, Greek, Hindi, Hausa, Indonesian,
Malay, Urdu.

Category 3: Amharic, Armenian, Azeri, Bengali, Burmese, Czech, Finnish,
Georgian, Hebrew, Hungarian, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Khmer, Lao, Nepali, Polish,
Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Sinhala, Tagalog, Thai, Tamil, Turkish, Uzbek,
Vietnamese.

Category 4: Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean.

dhaggo at thespec.com

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