Faced with a $42 million cut in public funding, the University  of California Berkley announced  the elimination of basic instruction in Portuguese, Russian, Swahili and Japanese, while adding more than 30 new foreign language courses to its offerings.

Beginning in 2011-12, over $500,000 will go towards supporting an additional eight Chinese courses, six Spanish courses, four Japanese courses, three Korean courses and one additional section each for 10 other languages such as Arabic, German and Tagalog.

A recent report from the Modern Language Association  revealed that foreign language undergraduate enrollments increased 6.6 percent between 2006 and 2009 in the United States. According to the same report, although Portuguese ranked the least taught foreign language in the country after Korean, there was an increase of 10.8% in Portuguese class enrollment in colleges and universities in the last 10 years.