The number of people studying the Persian language in American colleges and
The number of people studying the Persian language in American colleges and universities rose 16 percent in the last three years, but still distantly trails Arabic, which has 12 times as many students.
A new report issued last week by the Modern Language Association of America (MLA), tabulates how many students are studying each of 232 languages taught at American colleges and universities.
The huge number of languages can be misleading since 153 of those languages or two-thirds of the total have fewer than 100 students each and account for less than 1 percent of all the language students in the American colleges. These small language groups include many Indian tongues and South Pacific island languages.
Furthermore, one single language – Spanish – now totally dominates in American schools; 53 percent of all those studying language in an American college or university are taking Spanish. Spanish students have outnumbered all other language students in the United States since 1995. In 2009, four times as many students took Spanish as the second ranking tongue, French.
The figures are for students enrolled in the fall of 2009, the latest year for which MLA could assemble statistics. MLA does the tabulation every three years, so its comparisons are with 2006.
The tabulation shows that Persian ranked 14th in U.S. colleges and universities with 2,783 students studying the language last year, up 16 percent from the 2,403 students of Persian in 2006.
That was a substantial growth, but trailed far behind Arabic with 35,083 students in 2009, up a startling 46 percent from 23,974 in 2006. Arabic enjoyed the largest growth by far of any major language.
A few dozen more students were taking Persian than Vietnamese, the language of the immigrant group that came to the United States in large numbers starting in 1975, just four years before Iranians began pouring into the United States.
The MLA tabulations actually showed Persian lower down the list. But the MLA tabulation listed languages as they were named by the reporting schools. So MLA showed 1,897 students studying Persian, 322 taking Farsi, 335 taking “Farsi/Persian,” 17 studying Dari, 158 taking Iranian, 21 taking “Old Iranian,” 29 taking “Afghan Persian” and 4 taking Tajik. The Iran Times combined all these categories into one.
Following are the 18 languages for which enrollment exceeded 2,000. Note that ASL (American Sign Language for the deaf) is now treated as a language at most American schools.
Lang Number % of total
Spanish 864,986 53.0 %
French 216,419 13.3 %
German 96,349 5.9 %
ASL 91,768 5.6 %
Italian 80,752 4.9 %
Japanese 73,434 4.5 %
Chinese 60,976 3.7 %
Arabic 35,083 2.2 %
Russian 26,883 1.6 %
Hebrew 22,052 1.3 %
Portuguese 11,371 0.7 %
Korean 8,511 0.5 %
Hindi 2,846 0.2 %
Persian 2,783 0.2 %
Vietnamese 2,715 0.2 %
Swahili 2,488 0.2 %
Greek, Mod. 2,018 0.1 %
Hawaiian 2,006 0.1 %
214 others 25,890 1.6 %
Via Iran Times, 17 December 2010.