Transcript for the Piece Audio version of Parlez-vous Punjabi?

Melby: Nobody said learning Arabic was going to be easy.

Hisham Khalek (15 seconds): And for about a second you are blocking the windpipe at the top in the back of your mouth and then blowing out. KKUUHH. KKUUHH. Try it. KKUUHH.

Class: KKUUHH

Despite the difficulty, more American students are trying to wrap their tongues around Arabic. According to the Modern Language Association, about 10,000 college students were enrolled at last count. That’s more than double the number of people studying Arabic prior to the September 11th attacks.

That may seem like an encouraging since the government desperately needs people who can speak more than just European languages. But it’s really more complex than that.

Richard Brecht (5 seconds): Arabic has gotten all the headlines, but it’s not the only target that we have to pay attention to.

That’s Richard Brecht. He’s with the Center for the Advanced Study of Language at the University of Maryland. Brecht says if you dig a little deeper, there’s a whole list of languages vital to the war on terror.

Richard Brecht (17 seconds): Pashto, Urdu, Farsi, Bahasa Indonesia, Pilipino, and Tagalog. These are languages that are critical now in the war on terrorism. Yet they belong in the category of we don’t teach them at all or we only have a handful of students taking them.

Recent issues of the Economist magazine and Foreign Affairs have featured ads from the CIA and FBI. They plead with readers who can speak foreign languages to apply for jobs.

The CIA says it’s looking for people who are fluent in Chinese, Korean, Hindi, Urdu, Arabic and Farsi. The FBI ad also cites these languages, plus seven more lesser-known languages of its own, including Punjabi. That’s spoken by most members of the Pakistani military. The FBI is also looking for Pashto, which is spoken in the tribal areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan, where Osama bin Laden is thought to be hiding.

Robert Baer is a former CIA field officer who worked in the Middle East and South Asia for 21 years.

Robert Baer (11 seconds): The people that we are at war with, if you want to put it that way, speak these languages. They can get on the phone and speak encoded Baloch, for instance. And we have no idea what they’re saying.

The FBI wants to change that. It hopes to hire 200 special agents who are fluent in Farsi, Pashto and the like by October 2005. But the FBI isn’t likely to find people with those language skills among native English speakers. That’s why FBI recruiter Jim Knights is looking elsewhere.

Jim Knights (8 seconds): We’re talking about probably native speakers. We’re talking about people who came over to this country as children and became U.S. citizens.

After all, America has plenty of people who already speak these languages. Tapping into this resource might seem like a good idea. But former CIA agent Robert Baer says … it won’t work.

Robert Baer (19 seconds): They can’t get them. Because the people now, the natives that speak these languages, can’t pass the security clearances. They just can’t get them through because they have relatives in the security services or foreign governments. They just can’t get them though. So we’re going to have this black hole that’s going to go on for a long time until we can come around and learn these languages.

The latest survey conducted by the Modern Language Association confirms that pessimistic assessment. According to the study, only about 1,200 college students were enrolled in Farsi classes. Other languages fared even worse: Just 99 students were trying to tackle Punjabi and a mere 14 were studying Pashto.

I’m Todd Melby in Minneapolis.