Language choices

Military Intelligence Professional Bulletin, Oct-Dec, 2003 by Ray Lane Aldrich

Afghanistan? Iraq? What do they speak ... over there?

The bottom line is, "The commander asks for what he needs." There is no substitute for boots-on-the-ground experience.

That said, there are ways to narrow the field of choices. That's what we at the Army Foreign Language Proponency Office (AFLPO) try to do early enough to appear as if we knew what we were doing when the requests begin to come in. The process has improved significantly since we were hit with the initial question of, "What do they talk in Somalia?" We were at a total loss. Everyone in the office had grown up in the simple bipolar world of the U.S. versus Russia and China.

If you let your attention wander for a moment, the whole world changes around you. We weren't totally asleep; we knew the general solution in Somalia, we just weren't certain what language they spoke.

I'm not positive we're better now. We're certainly a lot less naive and we have developed a system and plan for doing a little advance research. Let me take you through some of the steps and reveal not only the thought processes involved but also some of the actual sources of information, on which we've come to rely.

We have come quite a way since Somalia. While I've personally decided that the whole process is just as well done using the techniques of the Crone who sends the Thirteenth Warrior on his way, there is now a semi-scientific method involved. Don't ask about "The Ethnic Name Test"!

The first thing I usually check is the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) World Fact Book. It is on-line, comes with a nifty little map, and provides some interesting background information beyond just the languages spoken in a given country. From "the Fact Book" you can get a feel for the religions, the ethnic backgrounds, the education level, and some of the political forces at work on the country. I take the coward's way out on this and print out anything that looks remotely interesting. That way I'm covered, in "the file," when most of the conventional questions are asked.

The second thing I check is the Ethnologue database. It too is online. These are the folks that bring you the magic number of "6,800 spoken languages." They are known also for their involvement with the Summer Institute of Languages (SIL). Their primary purpose is "bible" publishing. In the process, they check to see what languages need to have bibles published. The primary result of all of this scholarly investigation, beyond "more than you really want to know about bibles," is a list of the languages spoken in a given area and a general feel for the number of speakers of that language.

Beyond the first two sources, the investigation process gets a little confused and inconsistent. This is one of those areas in which there is no such thing as knowing too much. No other sources of information consistently have the answers that we need. I usually end up checking Country Studies, the old Area Handbooks, now available from the Library of Congress and, if you're lucky, from your local library. A word of caution concerning these Country Studies, however, many of them are dated.

As long as we're looking for information, one of my prime considerations is getting as much as I can without having to stir my seat from in front of the computer. I have my coffee source, my soft drink source, my restroom, my co-workers, and, oh-by-the-way, my boss, all close at hand.

I then turn to my local search engine for either the country involved or the "language du jour." Tourist guides are often quite helpful, bearing in mind that you need to maintain your military perspective.

Another necessary place to look, once you've gathered most of your generic language information, is the AR 611-6 list of Language Identification Codes (LICs) and a quick scan of the other language data contained in the appendixes. You may have to dig for an older copy to find some of the data. Please, also be aware that there are some errors that have been incorporated in the LICs shown in the regulation.

Once you have the LICs for the languages that look like your best candidates for use, you then need to figure out how many linguists the Army has in that particular "flavor." Yet another caution, under the heading of nothing is ever as easy as it should be, there will be some languages in which you are interested that do not have two-digit LICs. Be flexible. The data may not be correct. I don't KNOW why! I have a couple of theories, but they aren't pertinent in this article.

The most memorable case, to me at least, involving incorrect data was back during the Somali Scavenger Hunt. According to the data available, the Army had ten Somali linguists. When we really began to check for the people involved, we discovered what we actually had were five Samoan linguists whose LIC had been incorrectly entered and five Reserve Component soldiers who were enrolled in the "Simultaneous Membership Program." We actually had no Somali-speaking soldiers. (In case you haven't figured it out, the LIC for Somali is "SM.")