WASHINGTON -- Unless America pumps up foreign language education, both the nation’s global competitiveness and national security could be at risk.

That’s the opinion of a cross-section of experts concerned that a weakened economy and heightened international tensions leave the nation in need of clearer communication with friend and foe alike. Deficiencies in Middle Eastern and Asian languages pose the most immediate problems.

“If the U.S., in the modern world, is going to maintain its position as a global leader,” said Ken Gude, a former Center for National Security Studies policy analyst, “it’s going to have to become more conversant.”

An estimated 200 million school-aged children in China study English, according to a 2006 Education Department release. Just 24,000 of their U.S. counterparts study Chinese languages. The gap is significant.

David Gray, former Labor Department acting assistant secretary for policy, said one thing is certain to emerge from the retooling of the worldwide financial system – greater global challenges to America’s economic dominance.

It used to be that the U.S. could skate by with workers who spoke only English, Gray said, because they sold to a more concentrated customer base and the quality of their products was superior.

But now that countries like India are closing the quality gap – offering products that are equally good or better – U.S. businesses are forced to adopt new strategies.

“In a more competitive market where products are increasing in quality,” said Gray, who now works at the New America Foundation, a Washington-based think tank, “we need to be able to compete on relationships and service, (and) languages are an important factor.”

Technology and globalization are also boosting the number of players in competitive markets, putting the U.S. at a further disadvantage with countries where workers grow up learning multiple languages.

“The communication and technology revolutions make it imperative that we be able to communicate with people who don’t speak English (primarily),” Gray said. “To make a sale, you have a great disadvantage if your competitor speaks the language of the customer and you don’t.”

Just 31 percent of American elementary schools (and only 24 percent of public elementary schools) teach foreign languages, and 79 percent of these schools are geared at basic language exposure, not proficiency, according to Center for Applied Linguistics data put forth by the Education Department in 2006.

“We are very unusual in the world’s developed countries in our learning of foreign languages,” said Catherine Ingold, director of the National Foreign Language Center, “and the tiny space it gets in the curriculum.”

Critical language learning for national security

Less than half of American high school students are enrolled in foreign language classes, according to 2002 Digest of Education statistics, released by the Education Department in 2006.

Of those students, the overwhelming majority are enrolled in Spanish and less than 1 percent combined study Arabic, Chinese, Farsi, Japanese, Russian or Urdu.

“By default, Spanish is far and away the most widely taught language in the United States,” Ingold said. As the majority of U.S. education policy is driven at the state or local level, the languages taught in high schools are usually a reflection of parent demand.

Various agencies involved with national security, including the Defense and State departments, and the CIA, try to combat America's lack of critical language proficiency with their own training programs for translators, interpreters and other officials who need these skills.

But defense and language authorities are calling for more systematic foreign language education efforts.

“It’s necessary and important for the intelligence agencies to have late-stage intensive training,” said Gude, who now works for the left-leaning Center for American Progress, “but that’s just a band-aid (solution).”

It’s easier for students to pick up new languages and speak without an accent, experts maintain, if they’re exposed at an early age.

“(Language learning) is important for relationship purposes,” said Shaheen Parveen, a University of North Carolina professor who teachers Hindi-Urdu instructor at Chapel Hill. “There’s an intense relationship between culture and language. So if you don’t know a language, you can’t fully understand culture.”Military security is at risk anytime there’s a lack of knowledge of languages used by threatening forces, according to a former U.S. intelligence agency linguist who requested anonymity.

As the U.S. helps piece together the recent terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India, the former intelligence agent said he suspects there will be a greater need for Urdu, spoken in Pakistan; Hindi, spoken in India; and possibly Pashto, spoken in Afghanistan or Dari, spoken in eastern Iran and western Afghanistan.

With more than 6,000 languages spoken across the globe, it’s difficult to set priorities for learning. And higher demand for knowledge of regional dialects in hot zones like Afghanistan contributes to this problem, experts said.

The idea of language education for national security purposes got a lot of currency following the 9/11 attacks. At the time, experts said, intelligence information was collected, but would sit on a desk because there weren’t enough critical foreign language speakers available to evaluate it.

“(9/11) was sort of this wakeup call that we need to be communicating better in both directions with the rest of the world,” Ingold said.

Inas Hassaan, who teaches Arabic at the University of Maryland, said the United States, as the most developed country, shouldn’t need a crisis to draw attention to the intense need for more proficiency in these critical languages.

Solutions under way, but glaring language shortage remains

As part of the 9/11 aftermath, the federal government put forth the National Security Language Initiative in 2006, an inter-agency effort of the Departments of State, Education and Defense, along with the director of national intelligence, to address critical language teaching and learning.

The ongoing initiative has lots of moving parts. Some are achieving relative success, including teacher exchanges and student study abroad programs funded through the State Department. Another program, called Startalk, is designed to boost government-defined critical languages through summer programs that reach students and train language teachers.

But funding for Foreign Language Assistance Program (FLAP) grants, which help public school districts to develop longer sequences in critical languages, shrunk from $2.6 million in 2006 to less than $200,000 in 2008.

And other 2006 proposed language initiatives, including a Language Teacher Corps and E-Learning Clearinghouse for foreign language education, were never funded.

Student enrollment in college-level foreign language classes rose 13 percent between 2002 and 2006, according to Modern Language Association data. The same time period also showed encouraging higher-education growth in the study of non-European languages.

But the number of students who study enough advanced courses to gain fluency is minimal, experts said. And this compounds the nation's language problem, because the U.S. does not have enough qualified instructors to teach many of the less commonly studied languages.

Greg Smith, 20, an Asian studies major at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, plans to graduate with fluency in both Hind-Urdu and Mandarin Chinese. The sophomore said he's worried the nation isn't looking enough toward the future in terms of language education.

"We've seen the writing on the wall for at least as long as I've been alive," Smith said, "that Asia's going to be a much more important part of the global economy and international politics. I will be able to understand things that are not translated for the western audience."