Lost in non-translation

The Post has a slightly misleading piece up, Looking to Adopt A Foreign Tongue: Student Interest in Asian, Mideast Languages Surging.

Told through the story of an interesting student at Maryland who literally stumbled into studying Persian, the numbers, Susan Kinzie reports, are:

Interest in non-European languages, traditionally less commonly taught in the United States, has been surging, according to survey results released yesterday by the Modern Language Association.

More college students across the country are enrolling in language classes, and that is particularly true for Middle Eastern and Asian languages. Chinese language classes jumped 51 percent from 2002 to 2006 to nearly 52,000, and Korean grew 37 percent to more than 7,000. Arabic classes increased more than 126 percent to nearly 24,000.

And enrollments in Persian language classes nearly doubled nationally, although the total numbers, around 2,300, are still tiny, especially compared to popular languages such as Spanish.

Oddly, the article doesn't list the comparable numbers. Off the MLA website, we find:

The study of the most popular languages--Spanish, French, and German--continues to grow and represents more than 70% of language enrollments.

Inside, in the press release, we find the full list, with numbers of students enrolled/% of all enrollments/increase since 2002:

1) Spanish 822,985 52.2% + 10.3%

2) French 206,426 13.1% + 2.2%

3) German 94,264 6.0% + 3.5%

4) American Sign Language 78,829 5.0% + 29.7%

5) Italian 78,368 5.0% + 22.6%

6) Japanese 66,605 4.2% + 27.5%

7) Chinese 51,582 3.3% + 51.0%

8) Latin 32,191 2.0% + 7.9%

9) Russian 24,845 1.6% + 3.9%

10) Arabic 23,974 1.5% +126.5%

11) Ancient Greek 22,849 1.4% + 12.1%

12) Biblical Hebrew 14,140 0.9% - 0.3%

13) Portuguese 10,267 0.7% + 22.4%

14) Modern Hebrew 9,612 0.6% + 11.5%

15) Korean 7,145 0.5% + 37.1%

Hmm, "surging?" Heck, you could just as easily have written a piece about ASL, Italian, and Portuguese....

The headline's particularly egregious, since it presumes the traditional European trio of Spanish/French/German aren't 'foreign' the way these Asian and Middle Eastern tongues are.

In addition--when you start with such a small base, you'd think it'd be pretty critical to show the other languages for comparison so readers can understand how underwhelming the numbers overall are. And to note similar spikes were seen in other languages that can't be explained by geopolitics.

Maybe all that happened is we're in the middle of a surge in college enrollment, so with more kids around, more of them are taking pretty much all languages.

Or, since we know smaller schools can experience a spike in applications through such random things as one of their sports teams doing particularly well in football/basketball, or through placement on a big TV show/movie, maybe kids walking past TVs are just hearing these countries more, making them seem more relateable.

Really, I think the article should've been: Tripping Over A Foreign Tongue: Student Interest in Asian, Mideast Languages Lags Far Behind Where Reason Would Place It, Experts Probe Impact of Media Portrayal of Non-European Countries As 'FOREIGN'