This report describes lower- and upper-level undergraduate and graduate course enrollments in languages other than English in summer and fall 2016 reported by 2,547 AA-, BA-, MA-, and PhD-granting colleges and universities in the United States. Between fall 2013 and fall 2016, enrollments in languages other than English fell 9.2% in colleges and…

While there are many difficulties faced by world language educators, both teachers and students of certain languages--languages commonly identified with countries and cultures deemed to be hostile to the United States--often find themselves in uniquely paradoxical situations. This article begins with a brief anecdotal description of the personal…

The purpose of the maps was to show the density and distribution of students enrolled in foreign language courses in Austin Independent School District (AISD) high schools and middle schools and to show the distribution of student enrollment in Spanish-language courses, as well as the density of Spanish-speaking English language learners (ELLs) in…

SINCE 1958, the Modern Language Association (MLA) has gathered and analyzed data on undergraduate and graduate course enrollments in languages other than English in United States colleges and universities. The previous survey examined language enrollments in fall 2009; here the MLA presents its twenty-third survey in the series, describing trends…

Examinations of the etymology of American Sign Language have typically involved superficial analyses of signs as they exist over a short period of time. While it is widely known that ASL is related to French Sign Language, there has yet to be a comprehensive study of this historic relationship between their lexicons. This article presents…

Given that the linguistic articulators for sign language are also used to produce co-speech gesture, we examined whether one year of academic instruction in American Sign Language (ASL) impacts the rate and nature of gestures produced when speaking English. A survey study revealed that 75% of ASL learners (N = 95), but only 14% of Romance language…

Total enrollments (undergraduate and graduate) in languages other than English dropped by 9.2% between fall 2013 and fall 2016, as reported in the Modern Language Association's twenty-fifth language enrollment census. Despite the overall drop, there were gains in nearly half of all language programs (45.5%) that mitigate somewhat the downward…

American Sign Language (ASL) is the natural and preferred language of the Deaf community in both the United States and Canada. Woodward (1978) estimated that approximately 60% of the ASL lexicon is derived from early 19th century French Sign Language, which is known as "langue des signes francaise" (LSF). The lexicon of LSF and ASL may…