Northern Australia, 1990s, I could choose Modern Greek, Indonesian, Chinese (I assume Mandarin), or Japanese. In fact, I took at least 5 weeks of each of these, and settled on Indonesian, which I studied throughout high school and university. I am technically a qualified high school Indonesian teacher now, although I’ve never taught languages, and am very rusty.
I did learn in my LOTE (languages other than English) teaching course how badly I’d been taught before! Very little effort was made to interest students in the 5 week taster courses. Shame.
French, Spanish and Latin for sure. I checked German because I think it was offered at one point, but I could be misremembering. IIRC it wasn’t offered all 4 years.
Fox River Valley (near Green Bay). I took 2 years of French. Some of my ancestors were early settlers from French Canada.
What makes this ridiculous is I grew up in severe Northern Maine, where the population is essentially bi-lingual: French/English. I had friends who’s parents couldn’t speak fluent English. Most every kid knew some French. Hell, I had to learn some French just to operate in Canada across the border.
So … every kid took French for their Foreign language and, of course, got A’s.
I attended Lawndale High in Lawndale, CA, first semester of my freshman year; thery had French (which I took), Spanish, and German.
We moved, and I finished school at Redondo High, where the languages were French, Spanish, Latin, and Russian, which I forgot to add in the poll! :o They also started a Greek club during my junior year.
Huh. My high school offered Spanish, French, German and Russian (early '80s). I looked up their website and somewhere along the way they dropped Russian. I guess they’re not worried about their grads having to talk to the Russkies some day.
Qin, it’s just a nitpick, but “lingua franca” does not mean quite what you seem to think it does. A lingua franca is a language that serves as a medium between different nations or populations whose own languages are not the same. In other words, English is not the lingua franca of England; it is the native language, or perhaps the milk tongue.
The high schools in my city weren’t big on language. We had French immersion (being Canadian, but one of the least French-speaking provinces) but you couldn’t start taking it in high school, you had to have the fluency from grade school French immersion.
Colonial languages aren’t native/mother languages for many of their users: they’re the official language, they act as the lingua franca (or as one of its components), but a lot of the people using them have other languages as their mother tongue.
I checked German, French, and Spanish (“regular” classes chosen by many pupils), plus Latin, which was essentially an independent study. Scott, who was in my speech class, said that he was the only student in his Latin course, and that he got A’s on all assignments because he found the teacher’s guide in the school library. In addition, the teacher was so old and senile that Scott joked she had originally read Caesar’s “Commentaries about the Gallic War” in her Current Events class.
I forgot that the woman who taught German also offered Russian if anyone was interested, and my friend Dan took advantage of the opportunity. He got a kick out of the fact that his penmanship, generally described as “atrocious”, became “excellent” when he got to write in the Cyrillic alphabet.
I took Spanish all the way through graduation in 1977 at my large suburban public high school in suburban Cleveland, Ohio. As I recall, Spanish was the most popular, followed by French, then German. Nobody was required to take a language (other than English), but it was expected that any college-bound student would take advantage of the opportunity to become at least nominally bilingual.
New England, early 90s. French and Spanish. FTR there were only 400 kids in my high school, so that explains why there weren’t more choices. And oh, you had to take two years of a foreign language to graduate. I did a poll on that and that’s pretty unusual, only about a quarter of other dopers also had to take a language to graduate high school. Some didn’t even in college!
The main language offerings in one of my high schools (I moved around a lot as a kid) was English, Spanish, and French.
Hey! I took this course in one of my schools as well! One of our texts was ‘A Reader in Modern Literary Arabic’ by Farhat J. Ziadeh. Did you also use this book?
I was so impressed by my Literary Arabic teacher, Mr. Peterson, that I asked him to sign the inside cover of my book at the end of my final semester, which I still have. I credit Mr. Peterson for nurturing my passion for languages.
Only English, which was/is a requirement. But if you were a junior or senior in my high school, you could take the college level language courses (French, Italian, German, etc.) across the street, at the university (my high school is part of the university). I had a classmate who took French. Unfortunately, though, that usually meant waking up really early, staying really late, or weird contortions to the schedule so that you could take those classes.
Other private schools back home offer French. I do not know any which offer Latin, or anything else.