More than three times as many students study foreign languages at four-year colleges as at two-year colleges. The following table from the MLA report shows how enrollments were going up in most languages until 2009, only to then start dropping. Korean is now 11th, having passed ancient Greek, biblical Hebrew and Portuguese. Japanese is fifth, jumping ahead of Italian.
But there have been some changes in these ranks.
The top three foreign languages are the same as in 2013: Spanish, French and American Sign Language. All of the 15 most widely taught languages in 2016 saw declines from 2013 except for Japanese and Korean. While Spanish remains, by far, the most widely taught foreign language, it saw declines from 2013 to 2016. Just this week, the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point, as part of a retrenchment of many liberal arts programs, announced that it was eliminating its majors in French, German and Spanish. In recent years, many smaller language programs have found themselves targets of elimination at private colleges without significant endowments and at regional public universities that are lacking in consistent state support. These findings, a report from the MLA says, suggest that the declines reported in 2013 were "the beginning of a trend rather than a blip." Since 2009, enrollments are off more than 15 percent. The drop is the second largest since the MLA started tracking such information in 1958.ĭecades of increases ended after 2009, the MLA found. Foreign language enrollments dropped 9.2 percent from fall 2013 to fall 2016, according to new data from the Modern Language Association.