Organizations across the metro area are having to answer that question more frequently as they encounter native speakers from a wide catalog of tongues, according to data from Language Line Services, a Monterey, Calif. firm that provides over-the-phone interpretation services in more than 170 languages.

Language Line's clients include government agencies, health-care providers and a variety of businesses including insurance companies and utilities. When interacting with a non-English speaker, the client calls Language Line, which patches in one of 5,000 interpreters working all over the world.

Each quarter, the company compiles the number of requests for interpretation services from customers in major metropolitan areas around the U.S. The data helps Language Line determine how to best allocate its interpreters and whether to add new languages to its repertoire.  

While better-known languages like Spanish, French, Vietnamese, Korean and Russian remained among most requested languages in Atlanta, those seeing the greatest demand increases in the first quarter of 2010 are likely obscure to most Americans.

Requests in Atlanta for Tongan, spoken mostly on the Pacific island of Tonga, jumped by 400 percent from the same period last year, as did Haitian Creole.

Three times more requests came in for Oromo, spoken by a tribe of the same name whose members live in Kenya and Ethiopia. Nepali was up 135 percent, followed by Diula (100 percent), Tigrinya (80 percent), Ibo (57 percent) and many others.

It's not always easy to pinpoint the factors that lead to higher demand for certain languages in an area, said Greg Holt, who handles government accounts for the company.

Neither is it necessarily intuitive. In Atlanta, some languages from countries with a high level of English proficiency showed the biggest growth. Requests for Danish interpretation in Atlanta grew by 1,000 percent and for Finnish by 167 percent. Only the percentage increases were available, not the raw number of requests.

Such statistical spikes can come from a sudden small influx of immigrants, especially if the number of existing speakers in an area is low, Mr. Holt said.

"Sometimes there are communities where previously there has been nothing, and even a small community is resettled and they start tapping into the local services. Something like that would then register," he said.

With refugee resettlement and globalization accelerating, that's happening more often, and it's shaking up some American towns.

“There are so many cities and small towns where for a long time it was monolingual, and then all of a sudden here is this population of people from the Marshall Islands,” Mr. Holt said. "They're scratching their head and saying, 'Where did these people come from?'"

It happens seemingly without rhyme or reason. Somali, spoken in the turbulent East African nation of Somalia, is now the second most requested language in the southwestern part of the U.S. behind Spanish, he said.

"There are trends like that everywhere. That just requires that we be very aware of those changes in touch with customers who are in the trenches out there trying to overcome these language barriers," he said.

The most commonly requested languages by emergency services, government agencies health care facilities and businesses in metro Atlanta: Spanish, Vietnamese, Haitian Creole, Mandarin Chinese, Korean, Russian, Arabic, Bengali, Amharic and French.

Visit www.languageline.com for more information.

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