http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/05/education/05la...

"Some languages may seem less vital in a world increasingly dominated by English. Web sites and new technologies offer instant translations. The small, interactive classes typical of foreign language instruction are costly for universities."

"There are at least 54 foreign-language majors that have been either threatened or eliminated,” Dr. Peckham said. “People don’t realize that this is happening in a lot of places.”

"Dr. Feal said the program cuts also revealed an “Anglocentric perspective” that fluency in English was enough to understand the world.

What do you think the implications of these actions are?

That really is unfortunate. This is when I am a bit ashamed to be American. Just because English is widely spoken doesn't mean it's universally spoken.

What these universities don't realize is that through languages, you get a look at the cultures of the language which you otherwise wouldn't really get. You can study it at a distance from a book, but by learning the language, you get an intimate connection. This is one of the reasons why I love language in the first place.

Guh. Americans. Why are we so weird?

You are friggin kidding me?! Even the classics?! Latin and Greek?! INSANITAS, HOMO, INSANITAS PURA!

I'm finding it hard enough to figure out if Latin is even possible to study at my university (Flinders University), and we've only got Spanish, French, Italian, Greek and Indonesian (in order how how popular they are, Spanish the most), and the fact that universities are cutting language programs altogether makes me wonder if the worth of a degree from such universities will drop significantly in international occupations, and makes me as a language student feel rather uncertain about job security in the future. And I mean jobs I want to do and what I'm studying for

Furthermore, you're making it hard for language aficionados to actually get the exposure they need (that is, if it was there in the first place, e.g. being taught a language by a non-native with no experience in the culture is pointless).

Then again, the US is in a recession, no? But still, you can mend that sorta stuff with some decent social engineering, not with an infinite amount of cutbacks. This is just making things that one bit harder for the future America, if it indeed exists, y'got competition after all.

I hope that this trend doesn't continue for all my US equivalents out there for whom this would be horror.

I might be going off on a slight tangent here, but has anyone designed a course to learn a natural language through Esperanto? Would this be easier than learning the new natural language directly?

Not to worry. With all the resources that are available nowadays, it has never been easier to study a foreign language - and from the comfort of your own home.

The other side of the coin of the world wanting to learn English is that it so much easier to find a speaker of another language ready to give you practice in his or her language in exchange for conversation in English.

@ceigered I'm really surprised Greek is in that (relatively short) list. Do you have a lot of people of Greek descent or something? I would think that in place of Greek you'd have German or Chinese.

Interesting question Chris? I can't off the top of my head see why it would be easier for an English speaker to learn some national language with a coursebook in Esperanto rather than in English, but almost certainly there have been some attempts by Esperantists to write teaching materials for other languages.

It might well be that there is limited material in, say Finnish, for learning Basque, and an Esperanto guide to Basque might be opportune.

There are two areas where having learnt some Esperanto can be an advantage.

The first is that learning Esperanto has given you an easy introduction to the whole business of learning a foreign language.

The second is that through Esperanto it might be easier to make contact with a speaker of the foreign language who is ready to give you some practice and who has also quite a good insight into how his own language works - many Esperantists are quite sophisticated about language issues and distrustful of facile grammatical explanations.

On this last point, I might say that there are teachers of English (non-Esperantist), who should know better, who will trot out dubious accounts of aspects of English - like that the Present Perfect in English is for the recent past.

formiĉjo:

erinja:@ceigered I'm really surprised Greek is in that (relatively short) list. Do you have a lot of people of Greek descent or something? I would think that in place of Greek you'd have German or Chinese.

I think he may mean Ancient Greek. In seminaries, Ancient Greek is a required course. (When I was in seminary, I learned to read it, not write it )

No, believe it or not, it's MODERN Greek. Crazy eh! Oi Polloi! (well, more "ee pollee" now in this case eh). I don't know the status of Ancient Greek @ uni, but it mightn't be available at mine. A course search shows nothing.

The languages you can learn at a university in Adelaide are more or less as follows (more or less by popularity):

Spanish
French
German
Italian
Japanese/Chinese (they're both in the same "niche")
Greek
Indonesian

(There may be one more, can't remember. Ancient languages like Latin and Greek are normally learnt at Tabor, a christian tertiary establishment, or in archeology courses etc).

- Spanish because, well, this one actually is the least sensical of all, but somehow it became massive. I think it may be a late wave of the Spanish language obsession in the US.
- French, because it's French, what decent uni hasn't got French? (oh wait, I forgot about the thread's title)
- German, because of the above, plus, those with german hertiage
- Italian, ditto to german
- Japanese, because they're a big economic partner thingamabob. The Gov't also gives $$$ to those promoting regional languages (same with Chinese, Indonesian)
- Chinese, because they're MEANT to be more important to us than the rest of the languages above, but our cultural integrating with China is lagging massively (thus why Spanish is strange for being so popular)
- Greek, those with greek heritage, tourism, etc (the "main" European "ethnic groups" in Australia are the Italians, Greeks and Lebanese (all offensively/amicably referred to as "wogs" (See here). Usage notes for "wog" are the same as with "bloody" - it's a compliment or insult depending on context. Yes, the lebanese are European now.)
- Indonesian, because of Indonesian/Malay students and because like with China our regional integration needs a kickstart and $$$ from gov't for promoting the language.

@ Chrisim: Yep, there've been some Esperanto-OtherLanguage courses around. I can't think of any but they do exist. Googling is hard because "Lernu la francan lingvon" etc always takes you to "lernu!" .

Mi havas etan demandon - are these "colleges" you speak of in the title actually the equivalents of an Australian university? I know here in Australia we have TAFE which is what I believe to be definable as a "technical college".

I ask because if colleges are not the same as Universities then Australia's not so rosy either since we only really have accredited language courses either with language schools or uni. And only unis and TAFE allow HECS (which is effectively letting the government pay the initial fees and then we pay the rest off in tax provided we reach a certain amount of income/annum.)

The word "college" in the US can refer to a 4-year university (ending up with a bachelor's degree) or a 2-year "community college" (ending up with an associate's degree). People who study at a 2-year community college can usually transfer their credits to a 4-year university if they want to continue studying.

Complicating things further, there are 4-year universities that are called "Such-and-such College", but they would be called universities anywhere else in the world.