The Iraqi Arabic Dialect Orientation Course was originally designed to meet the immediate needs for Arabic speakers created during the first Gulf War in 1991.

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Despite the fact that are only approximately 6 million speakers of Modern Hebrew, a disproportionate amount of interest relative to its size exists in learning Hebrew. This is largely tied to Jewish communities around the world, but is also generated by interest among many Christian communities.

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The Finnish language is spoken by approximately six million people. It is also spoken in neighboring Sweden, Norway, Estonia, and Russia. For those interested in learning Finnish, one course to consider is the program originally developed by the Foreign Service Institute, a department within of the U.S. State Department.

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With 12 million speakers, Czech is certainly not the numerically smallest language spoken in the world. In comparison to languages like Spanish, French, German, Chinese, however, the differences in the numbers of speakers are significant.

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Anyone interested in learning Bulgarian has probably already realized that resources are quite limited. This can be quite frustrating.

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The challenge increases in realizing that reaching proficiency requires the student to not only speak but read Amharic. With the Amharic language using a non Latin alphabet, this is an extra challenge.

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Linguists tell us that all Indo-Aryan languages originated from Sanskrit. Three Prakrit languages, which are simpler in structure, emerged from Sanskrit: Saurseni, Magadhi and Maharashtri. Marathi is thought to descend from Maharashtri which was spoken by people that lived in the region of Maharashtra.

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When speaking about Spanish languages, is there really such a thing as Mexican? Is the Spanish spoken in Spain, drastically different from the Spanish spoken in Mexico?

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In conrast to Sephardic Jewish communities originating around the Mediterranean (including the Iberian peninsula, North Africa, and the

Levant) the Yiddish language belongs to the world of Ashkenazi Jewry of central and eastern Europe. The term Ashkenazi is derived from the Biblical word Ashkenaz which was traditionally interpreted in Jewish circles as the Hebrew word for Germany.

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The Hawaiian language is a member of the Polynesian group of Austronesian languages. Of the fewer than 10,000 people who speak Hawaiian, only a few hundred are native speakers. The language however is taught in some Hawaiian schools and remains important as a symbol of ethnic identity.

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