MLA releases Enrollments in Languages Other Than English in United States Institutions of Higher Education, Fall 2006
Modern Language Association
Webrelease November 13, 2007

Press release: http://www.mla.org/pdf/enrollment_survey_release.pdf
Full Report: http://www.mla.org/pdf/enrollmentsurvey_final.pdf 

More college students are taking foreign languages and language enrollment is at its highest since the 1960 survey. The overall increase from 2002 to 2006 in 11 of the 15 most popular languages grew faster than the overall 6.2% increase in the number of college students. Spanish, French and German continue to grow and are the most popular languages. Together they represent more than 70% of language enrollments. However, their dominance is slowly decreasing in the face of growing interest in languages such as Arabic (up 127%), Chinese (up 51%), and Korean (up 37%). The strong increase in Arabic enrollments moved the language onto the top 10 most studied list for the first time. 466 institutions of higher learning offer Arabic.

The 15 most popular languages on college campuses in fall 2006 were (percentage of students and increase from 2002):

1) Spanish: 52.2% (+ 10.3%)
2) French 13.1% (+ 2.2%)
3) German 6.0% (+ 3.5%)
4) American Sign Language 5.0% (+ 29.7%)
5) Italian 5.0% (+ 22.6%)
6) Japanese 4.2% (+ 27.5%)
7) Chinese 3.3% (+ 51.0%)
8) Latin 2.0% (+ 7.9%)
9) Russian 1.6% (+ 3.9%)
10) Arabic 1.5% (+126.5%)
11) Ancient Greek 1.4% (+ 12.1%)
12) Biblical Hebrew 0.9% (- 0.3%)
13) Portuguese 0.7% (+ 22.4%)
14) Modern Hebrew 0.6% (+ 11.5%)
15) Korean 0.5% (+ 37.1%)

The survey also shows a 31.2% increase in the number of languages outside the top being offered for study, for example languages such as Swahili, Persian, Hindi, and Catalan.