Arabic, a great language, has a low profile

AMONG THEIR many reverberations, the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001 had a linguistic side-effect. Between 2002 and 2009 the number of university students in America learning Arabic shot up by 231%, making it a more popular subject than Latin and Russian. This was a “Sputnik moment”: like the Soviet satellite, it shocked Americans into studying their adversaries.

But national attention soon wandered. Arabic-learning declined by 10% between 2009 and 2016—years in which America continued to fight in Iraq and later against Islamic State. In both America and Britain, Arabic is just the eighth-most-studied language, behind less important but somehow sexier ones such as (in British A-level exams) Italian.