France, 80s : English, Spanish, German, Italian , Russian, Hebrew, Latin, Greek (there were a couple others you could pick but you had to go to another nearby highschool for those lessons. Maybe people from other highschools were similarly coming to our for their Hebrew/Russian/whatever courses)
Looking, like a previous poster, the site of my former highschool, I see that now they only offer English, Spanish, German, Greek, Latin. You can also pick Hebrew, Russian or Chinese, but the courses are given in another high school.
So, including all options, basically Italian and Portuguese dissapeared and Chinese was added.
Is Palestinian Arabic close to literary Arabic? If not, does the average Palestinian typically understand literary Arabic?
You had departments at your high school? I’ve always thought of that as a college thing.
I’m not counting the basic subject divisions* as departments, BTW. You had a separate Classics Department, and it wasn’t just all lumped into the English and/or History section?
*They don’t count as departments in my mind if there is no head.
EDIT: I’m surprised so many of you guys had English as a foreign language class. It’s the next highest after Latin.
Pretty much every non-English speaking country is going to offer English as a foreign language in HS. No surprise about that.
None. Public high school in rural Alabama. Class of '86.
As long as we are picking at your “nits”, I will point out that:
[ul]
[li]you misspelled “Portuguese” [/li][li] “Afrikaner” is an ethic group that speak “Afrikaans”[/li][li] I would also suggest that Dutch be a separate entry in your poll since - according to my friends in SA - Afrikaans was the convergence of Dutch, German, and Flemish.[/li][/ul]
I don’t remember if there were department heads or not, though I think there were, but there were definitely administrative aspects to the different departments. The teachers would meet before the start of the school year according to the subjects they’d be teaching to set standards for the year, they’d meet during the year, they’d together prepare reports to the upper level administration.
Latin and Greek were most definitely the Classics Department, not the Modern Languages Department and definitely not the History Department or the English Department.
There were some electives open to upperclassmen that were within a particular department without being so “on the nose” such as: an Archaeology Class offered by the Classics Department and a Biomedical Ethics Class offered by the Religion Department.
When I graduated high school that was the requirement as well: two years of the same language. The school I teach at now has it as a suggestion. Either language or fine arts gets the requirement out of the way, but they push college-bound students into the language courses.
My major in college didn’t require any languages, so I skipped them.
You know, I have absolutely no recollection as to whether or not we had a language requirement to graduate. Now I feel old. 
But, it was “common knowledge” that you needed 2 years if you wanted to go to college, and most kids did exactly that-- 2 years and no more. I really liked foreign languages, so I took Spanish every year I was in HS, but most people just hated it. And most retained about ZERO ability to communicate in even the most marginal manner a year or two after finishing.
For non-US posters here, are foreign language classes routinely hated in your country? I think this might be a peculiarly American thing.
Googling and Wiki-ing trying to find a comprehensive list by State of U.S. public schools State requirements for foreign language study. I’m having trouble finding something comprehensive.
Anyone with better Google-fu or Wiki-fu?
I had hoped the page for Language Education in the United States would either have a State by State detail, or would have a link to a State by State detail in the “See Also” section, but no luck.