Demand for Arabic is booming

[Harold F. Schiffman]

Demand for Arabic language classes is booming
By SHARON SCHMICKLE Star Tribune

The Associated Press - Monday, April 17, 2006
 MINNEAPOLIS

Not everyone in Arabic 1102 at the University of Minnesota agrees with
President Bush that learning the language of the Middle East and much of
Africa is an urgent national security priority. That makes it seem like
the language of terrorism, student Sophia Yohannes said. To her, the more
compelling reason to study Arabic is the importance of maintaining
personal and cultural ties with a region that figures prominently in
today's events. Still, they agree with Bush's central point that far too
few Americans have bothered to learn the language of Islam, words spoken
by more than 300 million people worldwide. Whatever the reason, more and
more people are signing up for Arabic language instruction, a boom also
driven by military incentives and embarrassment over not speaking the
language of a part of the world that is crucial to U.S. foreign policy.

Five years ago, the university offered two sections of beginning Arabic.
Last fall five sections quickly filled, said Hisham Khalek, the lead
instructor. Universities in Wisconsin, Illinois and elsewhere have seen
the same spurt in interest. Administrators at Concordia Language Villages
plan to open its first Arabic camp in July, giving kids two weeks of
immersion in the language.  Near Vergas, the village is to be named
Al-Waha - or in English, Oasis. "We felt that this is an important part of
the world we were not addressing," said Christine Schulze, Concordia's
executive director and CEO. Congress put up half of the $500,000 that
Concordia needed to launch the village with the expectation that its
curriculum can serve as a model for other new Arabic programs.

Bush said in January that Americans need to learn Arabic and a few other
languages for national security reasons. "We need intelligence officers
who, when somebody says something in Arabic or Farsi or Urdu, knows what
they're talking about," Bush said in announcing his $114 million National
Security Language Initiative. A leading customer for Arabic classes is the
U.S. military, which found itself dangerously lacking in translators
during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In medical tents in the desert, it
wasn't unusual to see frustrated U.S. Navy doctors search phrase books for
the words wounded Iraqis were using to explain where it hurt. Marines at
checkpoints often had no way of asking friendly drivers whether Saddam
Fedayeen fighters were nearby. Now the Pentagon offers incentives for
service members who speak or learn Arabic. The Army, for example, offers
$10,000 bonuses to enlistees who speak Arabic and other Middle Eastern
languages and agree to work as translator aides. Several students in the
University of Minnesota's Arabic classes are training for military
service.

Cadet Erin Frederickson of Brooklyn Park sat in Khalek's class this month
struggling to crack the mysteries of the dots and dashes that accent the
right-to-left flow of Arabic script. As a member of the Air Force ROTC,
Frederickson expects to serve in the Middle East, and she's looking
forward to the extra pay the Air Force offers Arabic speakers. Most of
all, Frederickson said, she is determined not to be the brunt of an old
joke: What do you call a person who speaks three languages?
Multilingual. A person who speaks two languages? Bilingual. A person who
speaks one language? An American. Nor does she want to be limited, like
many American travelers, to begging "fee Hadd biyitkallim ingileezi?"
That's Arabic for, "Does anybody here speak English?"

Her goal, she said, is to learn enough Arabic so that she will be prepared
to "open doors and aid in making connections with the people." Most of
Khalek's students are not on a military track, though. Like Yohannes,
whose family has roots in Egypt, some of them study the language for what
Khalek called heritage reasons. Fellow student Jihan Jacobs didn't hear
much Arabic spoken at home in Minneapolis, and he was embarrassed to know
so little of his ancestral language when he visited relatives in Lebanon
two years ago. "Next time I'll be better," he vowed. But the bulk of the
students simply reflect the nature of the times. Just as interest in
Russia and China skyrocketed during the Cold War, the Middle East is a hot
topic now. "Arabic is the new Chinese," said Kelsey Murphy of Lakeville.

That is not to say that Arabic enrollments come anywhere near those in
Chinese or the more traditionally studied languages such as Spanish or
French. A survey by the Modern Language Association found that Arabic
enrollments grew 92.3 percent from 1998 to 2002, faster by far than any
other language except American Sign Language. Still, in 2002 Arabic ranked
only 12th among all languages studied at U.S. universities and colleges.
Murphy's point is that Arabic represents the vanguard for students in the
post-9/11 decade. In March, when the U.S. government posted captured Iraqi
documents on the Internet - in Arabic, of course - Tamara Mady of St. Paul
showed up at Arabic 1102 impatient to surge ahead with her studies.

"I wish I could translate those documents," she said. "I want to help."
With no small degree of generational pride, many of the non-Arab students
point out that they are learning a language their parents wouldn't have
studied. Indeed, Shawn Horton of Hibbing said he enrolled in Arabic
classes against his family's wishes. With almost daily reports of
kidnappings and killings in Iraq, relatives worry that his fascination
with the language will draw him toward Iraq or some other hot spot, he
said. Horton has a different vision. He looks at the Internet and the
almost instant reports of events around the world and sees hope for a
future in which language can bridge some of the differences that give rise
to hostility.

"It could quell a lot of our problems if more of our government officials
could spoke Arabic," he said, "if they could go on Al-Jazeera and
competently address the Arab world."

http://www.in-forum.com/ap/index.cfm?page=view&id=D8H1S2QG3