David L. Boren Awards for International Study

Is speaking a foreign language an advantageous skill for U.S. workers?  Isn’t English today’s lingua franca – the universal language?  A new report, What Business Wants: Language Needs in the 21st Century, commissioned by The Language Flagship, an initiative of the National Security Education Program, provides answers to these questions and contains results that some Americans may find surprising.

The results provide evidence that employees with foreign language skills offer their organizations distinct advantages, and suggest that U.S. companies are hard-pressed to find sufficient numbers of American workers with bilingual skills.  It also details some of the disadvantages experienced by U.S. enterprises that operate with a primarily monolingual workforce, not only when conducting international business but on the home front as well.

This first ever press event, Business Needs Language, will bring together top business leaders, education leaders, decision- and policy-makers and others from around the country to discuss the need for global language skills in business, the importance of learning a critical/non-traditional language, and the need for a Call to Action.

For more information about this event, please click here.