Coming of age during the 9/11 attacks and war in Iraq, some of the students in UCLA's advanced Arabic class want to launch diplomatic or military careers. Others seek to delve into the Koran and Islamic culture. And some simply love a mind-stretching, tongue-twisting challenge.
No matter the reasons, they help fuel a trend that has made Arabic the fastest-growing spoken language of study at U.S. colleges and universities.
Just as the teaching of Russian took off after the launching of the Sputnik satellite in 1957, more colleges than ever are starting or expanding courses in Arabic. Schools such as UCLA, UC Berkeley, USC and Pasadena City College report waiting lists for classes, with most of the demand coming from students whose families have no ties to the Islamic world.
In the next school year, California and other states are expected to see a flurry of initiatives to increase the study of Arabic, aided in part by President Bush's recent pledge to obtain more money for so-called strategic languages.
"The importance of Arabic as a language is not going to go away, no matter what happens in the Middle East. Even if things cool down there -- which I think is impossible in the immediate future -- it will be an important language," said Zoe Griffith, a history and Middle East studies major from Berkeley in that advanced UCLA class. Griffith, 21, is considering a career in human rights law.
Classmate Sami Hasan, 21, of Lompoc, whose parents emigrated from Pakistan, said world events led him to want to learn more about his religion -- Islam -- and to read the Koran in the original Arabic. Plus, fluency is "probably going to be invaluable in any field I go into," said Hasan, who is majoring in Arabic and international development studies. He plans to attend law school.
But students face many challenges in learning Arabic, which comprises a small fraction of the nation's language study programs.
There is a shortage of well-trained teachers and a lack of credentialing programs. Also, teachers and students say relatively high dropout rates reflect the difficulties of its right-to-left cursive script, the many dialects and pronunciation that is unfamiliar to Western ears.
Still, the rising level of interest is palpable at schools big and small. A survey by the Modern Language Assn. showed the number of students studying Arabic at U.S. colleges climbed 92.3% -- to 10,584 -- between 1998 and 2002. The number of undergraduate campuses teaching it jumped 48%, to 233.
