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Students gave a variety of reasons for selecting the languages they studied, which varied slightly based on which languages they selected. For example, students taking Spanish were more likely to mention the large world population of Spanish speakers, and French students unanimously mentioned their language's beauty. The following table shows the overall frequency of each response, for all the students surveyed. 19 students responded to this question, and students were able to select as many answers as they saw fit.
Interestingly, athough these students had definite opinions about which languages were more or less difficult to study, they did not seem to take ease into account as a main reason why they selected their own languages. The three students who had ease as a characteristic all studied different languages: Italian, Spanish, and Yiddish. I was also surprised by the number of students who had the distribution requirement as the deciding factor in their language selection; these results suggest that if it were not for this requirement, many students would not consider language courses. Do these reasons make sense? In the Research section, we saw that all languages can be learned with similar ease, meaning that students should not make the decisions based on one language being supposedly more difficult than another. But are the other reasons given by students for studying languages valid? The section below examines six of the most common reasons for choosing a language.
In a search of the Career Mosaic on-line help-wanted database for the word "fluent" or "fluency," 208 jobs contained one of those words. Of those, 115 were seeking (either preferred or required) fluency in a language. (The rest were looking either for fluency in computer languages or for "technical fluency.") Here is a graph of the languages requested:  The high incidence of some of these languages can be explained because some companies asking for language fluency posted many different job listings, all asking for the same language. For example, all of the listings that asked for "any language, preferably German" were for similar positions at the same corporation. However, in spite of this limitation to my research, some conclusions can be drawn from this graph: Spanish-speakers are by a wide margin the most-pursued language users by corporations. Other commonly-studied languages also appear prominently on the graph, such as French and German. The 9 respondents who planned to use their Spanish, German, or French in their careers have a good chance of finding a job that will allow them to do so. 18 jobs preferred or required fluency in an Asian language, with Chinese being the most popular. Unlike the "any language, preferably German" listings, most of the requests for Chinese came from different companies, suggesting that this might be a general trend and not just a job-listings-fluke. Interestingly, the one student of an Asian language in my survey did not mention business as a reason for her study. Finally, a significant minority of positions said that fluency in "any language" was plus, suggesting that it is language-learning ability and the dedication necessary to stay with a subject over time that are the employer's real aims. 53% of the respondents said that they wanted to study abroad in a country where they could use their language. Study abroad is usually an experience that combines study and tourism, and many college students hope to travel widely during their time away from home.The graph below, taken from the on-line Information Please Almanac and based on statistics from the World Tourism Organization, shows the number of international tourists entering each country for a tourism stay of more than one day in 1997. Although this graph shows all world travellers, not exclusively Americans, it is still a valuable source of data.  These tourism destinations seem to show that French and Spanish are still very valuable languages for tourists, but that other languages should also be considered. Italian, Chinese, and even lesser-spoken and rarely taught languages, such as Polish and Czech, would also be useful for travel. In addition to the countries shown on this graph, today's tourists are travelling to more and more exotic destinations, such as the Pacific Islands and Africa. Though the traditionally-studied languages do seem to be the best for the most popular destinations, there is no language that would not come in useful for intensive exotic travel. The graph below, based on statistics included in the on-line Information Please Almanac and collected by Ethnologue, shows the number of speakers of each of the 20 most popular first languages in 1996.  Mandarin Chinese is by far the most-spoken first language in the world, but it is only the 8th-most-popular language to study in the U.S. None of the Mount Holyoke students in the study had taken Chinese classes. Other languages in the top 20 are not even offered at U.S. schools, based upon the 1994 national statistics on the Which Languages Are Taught? page. These languages include the 4th most popular world language, Bengali, as well as two other languages in the top ten: Hindi and Wu Chinese. In total, half of the world's top 20 world first languages are not taught in any of the United States' public secondary schools. Based on this graph, Spanish students were correct to respond that "a lot of people in this world speak this language." Interestingly, 2 of the French students said they studied their language because of the world population, but none of the German students responded this way, even though there are actually more German-speakers in the world! Perhaps that is because Mt. Holyoke is relatively close to Quebec, a French speaking area, so that French seems a more dominant language. The following graph shows the number of U.S. residents who speak each non-English language at home in 1990. These statistics were taken from the on-line Information Please Almanac; they were originally collected by the Census Bureau.  Again, this graph shows languages that are prevalent in daily life may not be the same languages that are commonly studied in schools. Of these top twenty languages, for example, Tagalog, Hindi, Thai, Persian, Creole, and Armenian were not taught in any U.S. public secondary schools in 1994. On the other hand, however, Spanish is overwhelmingly the most common non-English first language in the U.S., and French, German, and Italian were next-most common. Of the students who replied that their studied language was in frequent use in their communities, 3 studied Spanish and one Yiddish, both languages that appear in this top twenty. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
