This report covers the teaching of African languages in American universities and by the United States Government since September, 1961. It is based on 100 percent response to a questionnaire circulated in the spring of 1966. Data are for languages actually taken for credit, not for those that were offered but did not materialize, or that were taken on an informal basis.

The principal facts about university programs are summarized in the accompanying graph. The number of student-semester-hours is shown as a solid line, the number of schools as a broken line, and the number of different languages as a dotted line.

The most obvious trend is, of course, rapid growth. The number of schools that teach African languages and the number of languages taught have more than doubled in five years, and the number of student-semester-hours has increased nearly sevenfold. Another major trend is toward maturity. The ratio of languages to schools has remained nearly constant at about 1.4, while the number of student-semester-hours per language has risen from 57 in 1961 to 172 in 1965. The increase in number of schools and number of languages seems to be leveling off, but the number of student-semester-hours is rising at an increasing rate.