Atlanta, Georgia. 1970s.
We were offered Spanish, French and Latin. I ended up taking 5 years of Latin (we didn’t have middle schools at the time and went from 8th through 12th grade in HS). That actually has come in handy at times.
I wish they had taught Klingon so I could read Hamlet in the original language.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/e/ee/TheKlingonHamlet.jpg/250px-TheKlingonHamlet.jpg
All we had were Spanish and French, which annoyed me because I didn’t want Spanish out of sheer stubbornness (I live in California, and everybody just kind of assumed that everybody would take Spanish), so I ended up taking French by necessity. I enjoyed it well enough, but I would have preferred something more interesting like German, Latin, Russian, or Japanese. I remember my friend had her parents try to get Latin established (she wanted to go to vet school) but it didn’t work.
French & Spanish; I took both, 4yrs of French & 3 of Spanish. I couldn’t do 4yrs of Spanish because my guidence counselor wouldn’t let me sign up for both freshman year. Most of the neigboring districts also offered German, and I think the parochial schools had Latin (I know for sure the Jesuit prep school did). Sometime after I graduated my school district started teaching Spanish in middle school too.
My high school offered Spanish only…but you could take German or French from correspondence courses and that would qualify.
My high school had the lowest level of funding per student in the entire county. (San Diego County, California.) Whee.
Thank you for pointing that out. :smack:
Suburban Southern California (Orange County), now, offers Spanish, French, and Japanese. Used to have German and Latin there.
By '81, we were talking about it in my Political Science classes, along with how the mushrooming Muslim population in Central Asia and the Caucasus was going to affect the Soviet Union.
We had a choice of French or German but also studied Irish as a compulsory subject. Nowadays students in my old high school have a choice of French, German, and Spanish. These would be by far the most common languages studied. Next would be Italian I reckon.
You can also sit exams in Latin, Greek, Arabic, Japanese, Russian, Classical Studies, and Hebrew Studies.
Early sixties, Cleveland Heights High School:
English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Hebrew, Latin and Greek.
The smart kids took Russian, Latin and Greek. The smart Jewish kids took Hebrew. The dumb kids took Spanish.
HS in the 90s, you took French OR Spanish, but you could take Latin too.
We had the same choices in California…
My high school (Waukegan IL, 1968-72) offered four years of French, German and Spanish, and one year of Latin and Russian.
I believe there were more students taking German than there were taking the other four languages combined. (I took three years of German.)
Had a Cherokee friend who took one year of German, IIRC, then dropped it on the grounds that he was already taking a foreign language: English.
I went to a private school in Minneapolis in the 80s-90s and they offered German, French, and Spanish. the school was founded by a Swedish based church and with the culture of the region for many year, they offered Swedish for many years, but dropped it right before my time.
Took 4 years of French, but I consider it a waste of my time because I never went to college and never got fluent in it, and if I want to go to France or Quebec they speak English there…
Since I went to Alliance, which was originally founded by French philanthropists, I was saddled with taking two foreign languages at the 5-point matriculation level (OK, I could have taken English at 4, but as an English-speaker that seemed kind of dumb ;)) – 5 points French was mandatory school policy.
Arabic was offered as well for the truly masochistic…
I didn’t list Hebrew because it wasn’t a foreign language! 
The Big Four, plus Italian, NJ, Class of 1991.
Suburban Baltimore, 20 years later, so late 80s/early 90s - Spanish, French, and German. I took Spanish, but never learned more than the stock “where is the library” type phrases until I started traveling in Latin America.
Go engineering!
And for fun, I just went to look at the website for my old high school. No more German, but they still have Spanish and French. They’ve added Chinese and ASL, which I think is cool!
English 1st to 12 grade. And french in 7th and 8th grade, that was the norm at the time (late 90’s) but french was taken out of the official curriculum. I must add that classes here aren’t “offered”, you just have the required classes by the government and school, anything else is usually offered as an optional extracurricular activity. The only exceptions are some schools that offer the choice between music and plastic arts, and sometimes in highschool you can take an elective class in either chemistry, physics or biology.
Typical public New England high school in the 60s/70s.
French
Spanish
German
Latin.
That is listed in order of popularity. I took Spanish.
I wonder how many public high schools teach Latin these days!
Public high school in RI, in a town with a very high percentage of Italian immigrants: French, Spanish and Italian were offered. I would have taken Italian, but only French was offered at my junior high school. Since I’d already done two years of French, I continued in that language. Class of '91.
That made me laugh, and also made me think of my freshman roommate in College.
