Students and Educators

Focus on less-commonly taught languages

NSEP emphasizes study of non-Western European languages critical to U.S. national security, such as Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Indonesian, Korean, Russian, and Turkish. NSEP award recipients, at both undergraduate and graduate levels, represent outstanding students and high aptitude language learners who have demonstrated prior and ongoing commitment to language study and a motivation to learn languages well outside the boundaries of Europe and Latin America. They are likely to have some prior experience in the language and are also likely to continue their language study following their NSEP supported program.

Many NSEP Scholars and Fellows have demonstrated proficiency levels in their languages prior to receiving NSEP support; yet because so few Americans have an opportunity to learn less commonly studied languages, NSEP also seeks to identify highly motivated individuals who wish to begin studying such languages for the first time.

NSEP Preferred Languages

The list of languages emphasized by NSEP reflects a need for more than 70 languages.

Albanian	Amharic	Arabic (and dialects)	Armenian
Azerbaijani	Belarussian	Bosnian	Bulgarian
Burmese	Cantonese	Czech	Georgian
Hebrew	Hindi	Hungarian	Indonesian
Japanese	Kazakh	Khmer	Korean
Kurdish	Kyrgyz	Lingala	Macedonian
Malay	Mandarin	Mongolian	Pashto
Persian (Farsi/Dari)	Polish	Portuguese	Romanian
Russian	Serbian	Sinhala	Slovak
Slovenian	Swahili	Tagalog	Tajik
Tamil	Thai	Turkish	Turkmen
Uighur	Ukrainian	Urdu	Uzbek
Vietnamese