<p>Languages for humanities programs tend to be more about reading ability than speaking.</p>
<p>IIRC the FLAS fellowships are for current students to do intensive language study - you have to be admitted to a university that offers a FLAS fellowship, and they have to award it to you. From the FLAS website: “Eligible students apply for fellowships directly to an institution that has received an allocation of fellowships from the U.S. Department of Education.” Different universities put different restrictions on their FLAS. For example, there was a poster here whose daughter was offered a FLAS fellowship upon admission to a university, IIRC. However, my own university (Columbia) only offers FLAS to advanced PhD candidates who need to do dissertation research in a different language, and even then</p>
<p>Ph.D. candidates applying for FLAS dissertation writing or dissertation research abroad must be already at the advanced level of language proficiency. The use of the foreign language in dissertation research must be extensive enough to be able to consider the language improvement facilitated by the research equal to improvement that would be obtained from a full academic year’s worth of formal classroom instruction. Please note that since the FLAS program is for language acquisition, use of the FLAS fellowship for dissertation writing or dissertation research is not encouraged by the U.S. Department of Education.</p>
<p>So the idea is to increase your language proficiency to the level at which you can write a dissertation in that language, or use the language to write your dissertation.</p>
<p>One thing to think about is the Fulbright. Although strictly speaking it’s not really a language program, you CAN add language learning to the first 6 weeks of the grant in certain languages and studying abroad for a full year is a great way to learn a language.</p>
<p>The other language scholarships I know about are for current students, like the [Boren</a> Fellowship](<a href=“https://www.borenawards.org/boren_fellowship]Boren”>https://www.borenawards.org/boren_fellowship) and the [Critical</a> Language Scholarship](<a href=“http://www.clscholarship.org/]Critical”>http://www.clscholarship.org/). Almost all of these programs are intended for students who want to learn less commonly taught/“critical” languages. </p>
<p>The Boren is focused on non-Western countries and you can only study French or Spanish if you are already advanced AND plan on going to a non-Western country (i.e., Francophone Africa for French or Latin or Central America for Spanish). Preference is given to students who are studying less commonly taught languages, like Arabic, Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (in Brazil), Persian, Turkish, Urdu, Hindi, Yoruba, Bosnian, Polish, Malay, Tagalog, etc. The CLS is <em>only</em> focused on certain less commonly taught languages, and for the more common of those (like Japanese and Arabic) you need to be more advanced.</p>