Section 601(c)(1) of the Higher Education Act of 1965 (HEA) requires that the Secretary of Education consult with Federal agency heads in order to receive recommendations regarding areas of national need for expertise in foreign languages and world regions. The Secretary may take those recommendations into account when identifying areas of national need for the International Education Programs authorized by Title VI of the HEA and administered by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Postsecondary Education (OPE). See HEA, Sec. 601(c) (20 U.S.C. 1121 (c)). What follows are the areas of national need identified by the Secretary, consisting of the seventy-eight priority languages that are less commonly taught and the world regions. The entire report is available at the US Department of Education’s Office of Postsecondary Education site.
List of priority languages:
• Akhan (Twi-Fante)
• Albanian
• Amharic
• Arabic (all dialects)
• Armenian
• Azeri (Azerbaijani)
• Balochi
• Bamanakan (Bamana, Bambara, Mandikan, Mandingo, Maninka, Dyula)
• Belarusian
• Bengali (Bangla)
• Berber (all languages)
• Bosnian
• Bulgarian
• Burmese
• Cebuano (Visayan)
• Chechen
• Chinese, Cantonese
• Chinese, Gan
• Chinese, Mandarin
• Chinese, Min
• Chinese, Wu
• Croatian
• Dari
• Dinka
• Georgian
• Gujarati
• Hausa
• Hebrew, Modern
• Hindi
• Igbo
• Indonesian
• Japanese
• Javanese
• Kannada
• Kashmiri
• Kazakh
• Khmer (Cambodian)
• Kirghiz
• Korean
• Kurdish – Kumanji
• Kurdish – Sorani
• Lao
• Malay (Bahasa Melayu or Malaysian)
• Malayalam
• Marathi
• Mongolian
• Nepali
• Oromo
• Panjabi
• Pashto
• Persian (Farsi)
• Polish
• Portuguese
• Quechua
• Romanian
• Russian
• Serbian
• Sinhala (Sinhalese)
• Somali
• Swahili
• Tagalog
• Tajik
• Tamil
• Telugu
• Thai
• Tibetan
• Tigrigna
• Turkish
• Turkmen
• Ukrainian
• Urdu
• Uyghur/Uigur
• Uzbek
• Vietnamese
• Wolof
• Xhosa
• Yoruba
• Zulu
