<p>
Arabic, Chinese, and Japanese are the new hot languages. Only the traditional European languages (Spanish, French, German, Italian) continue to be more popular, and Japanese is steadily gaining on Italian. Compare enrollments in 2009:</p>
<p>Italian: 80,752
Japanese: 73,434
Chinese: 60,976
Arabic: 35,083</p>
<p>Turkish: 638</p>
<p>I think any of the following would work perfectly well for a prospective IR student, considering that they are “thirteen critical need foreign languages” as defined by the Department of State.
[ul][<em>]Arabic
[</em>]Azerbaijani
[<em>]Bangla/Bengali
[</em>]Chinese
[<em>]Hindi
[</em>]Indonesian
[<em>]Japanese
[</em>]Korean
[<em>]Persian
[</em>]Punjabi
[<em>]Russian
[</em>]Turkish
[li]Urdu[/ul]</p>[/li]
<p>[A</a> list of colleges offering certain languages can be found here.](<a href=“http://www.carla.umn.edu/lctl/db/index.php]A”>The Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition (CARLA): Less Commonly Taught Languages)</p>