WASHINGTON: The book was entitled “The Tongue-Tied American: Confronting the Foreign Language Crisis” and its author found that a deficit of language skills threatened US business and national security. That was in 1980.

The words “globalisation” and “jihad” had not yet become household terms.

Fast forward to the present and the latest report on foreign languages and international education by the research council of the National Academies:

“A pervasive lack of knowledge about foreign cultures and foreign languages threatens the security of the United States as well as its ability to compete in the foreign market place.”

So has nothing changed since the late Paul Simon, then a congressman, later a senator, warned about the consequences of a tongue-tied America? Judging from a wealth of statistics, there has been much effort but little progress.

Then and now Americans who are fluent in other languages and familiar with other countries are a small minority. Language deficits span fields from international business and diplomacy to intelligence, law enforcement and the military.

The Sept 11 attacks might have been thwarted had there been linguists to sift through and analyse Arabic-language message traffic in the days before.

At one point after the attacks, the government said it had a 123,000-hour backlog of tapes in Middle Eastern languages.

Not all is gloom, however. Since the Sept 11 attacks and the resulting focus on the Middle East, there have been sharp increases in enrolments in Arabic classes and Middle East studies courses at US colleges.

The increases sound impressive: Arabic enrolments up 126.5 per cent from 2002 to 2006, according to the Modern Language Association.

That makes 23,974 students out of a student population of around 14.5 million. The increase has been so substantial there now is a shortage of language instructors.

The trend of sharp percentage increases and relatively modest absolute numbers transcends academia.

The Department of State, whose role is to foster better understanding with foreign countries, reports a 36 per cent increase in the number of officers who can hold a conversation in Arabic.

That means from 198 to 270 out of a foreign service of 11,500. An estimated 250 million people speak Arabic and the United States has embassies and consulates in almost all Arab countries.

President George Bush’s 2009 budget request, sent to Congress this week, provides for an additional three hundred slots for diplomats to study Arabic and other “superhard” languages, so called because it takes most students at least two years of six-hour-a-day instruction to get fluent enough for discussions on “practical, social and professional topics.”

The State Department is not alone in its problems of communicating with Middle Easterners in their own language.

The military, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency and others have all stepped up efforts to recruit linguists or native speakers of Arabic, Farsi, Dari and Pashto — the languages of Iran and Afghanistan — and all still fall short of the numbers they need.

So much for the Middle East, where being tongue-tied and half-deaf poses obvious security problems for the United States.

It suffers a language handicap, too, on the commercial front, where China is fast rising as a rival with superpower ambitions.

Enrolment in Chinese classes jumped more than 50 per cent, the second-biggest increase after Arabic, between 2002 and 2006 but here, too, the number is tiny: 51,582.

More than a billion people speak one of the two main Chinese languages.

For some Americans (and their British cousins), such disparities are no cause for concern. Before paying his first visit to China last month as British prime minister, Gordon Brown promised efforts to help the Chinese learn English, which he described as “a bridge across borders (and) the common future of human commerce and communication.”

That is an argument native English speakers can (and routinely do) turn round to read “why should I learn a foreign language? The foreigners are learning English.” With that mindset, there never was a “foreign language crisis.”

But language is not only a means of communication, it is a window into the mind of other people and a key to their culture.

Apart from language studies at home, the main gate to other cultures for many college-age Americans have been programmes that take them to foreign countries for a semester or a year.

These programmes have more than doubled over the past decade, according to the Institute of International Education (IIE).

But again, percentage increases tell only part of the story.

In 2006, more than 220,000 young Americans studied outside the United States. The small army of American students abroad accounted for 1.5 per cent of the college population.

Britain has long been the top destination for Americans studying abroad, though China has been moving up and now stands at 7th place.

“Even if the present rate of growth continues, the study abroad numbers will not add up to what is required to produce global citizens,” says IIE president Allan Goodman.

Will the US ever produce enough global citizens? By at least one statistic, there is more reason for despair than for hope.

In 1965, there were around 16 enrolments in foreign language courses for every hundred

college students. By 2006, that had shrunk by half.

—Reuters