What language should I learn in order to help out our government in the following years?

Help out our government how?

Chinese is important, but there are plenty of people who speak it in the US, even non-chinese people.

Same with Korean. The Korean-american population is HUGE in the US, and in fact so many are in the military that you can't draw language pay for speaking Korean unless your job requires it.

Arabic is in demand, but the US military trains a lot of people in arabic. (Badly...and there was that whole homos at DLI thing...god that was stupid.)

Russian is probably going to get more important again, and most of the old Russian linguists are aging, retiring, or forgetting by now. They still do train a lot of them, though, and it's a common university language.

If you really want to be a superstar, though, learn some strategic language which is what they call a "low-density language." Something you can't study at any decent university.

Any language from any of the -stans would be a good bet.

I would think that to avoid another 9/11 and another Iraqi WMD disaster, the US needs lots of people who can translate from and speak fluently :

- Modern Standard Arabic and Classical Arabic in all their variations: Egyptian, Maghrebi, Levantine, Iraqi, East Arabian, Gulf, ...

- Farsi (spoken in Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan as well as by minorities in Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Southern Russia)

- Urdu (national language of Pakistan)

- Pashto (spoken in in the western provinces of North-West Frontier Province, Federally Administered Tribal Areas, and Balochistan of Pakistan and in the south, east, west and a few northern provinces of Afghanistan. Most Taliban are Pashtun.)

- Hindi

- Korean

- Hebrew

And for economic reasons : French, German, Russian, Mandarin.

Arabic ! I think in the next 10 years we will live in an interesting time.

The world's fastest developing economy is China, so possibly Mandarin.

Eastern, Asian and Arabic languages, besides, of course, your native language.

a language that deprives the American people turns Spanish into our dominant language, ruins our economy and makes all our jobs go oversees so the big fish get rich and the little fish strive to survive or wait i forgot they all ready have that President Bush speaks it sorry about that. ;)

English. And learn it well.

Could may be Chinese or Korean or Japanese or (God bless us) Turkish.

Chinese....God help us all

spanish, vietnamese or japanese