A program of United States Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, the Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) Program offers intensive summer language institutes overseas in thirteen critical need foreign languages. Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) institutes provide fully-funded group-based intensive language instruction and structured cultural enrichment experiences for seven to ten weeks for U.S. citizen undergraduate, Master’s and Ph.D. students. The Critical Language Scholarship Program seeks participants from a variety of fields, backgrounds and career paths, with the goal of building a cadre of Americans who speak critical languages at high levels, in government, business, arts and culture, science and engineering, health and medicine, education, research and other fields.

Languages include: (1) Azerbaijani, Bangla/Bengali, Hindi, Indonesian, Korean, Punjabi, Turkish, and Urdu: Beginning, advanced beginning, intermediate and advanced levels; (2) Arabic and Persian: Advanced beginning, intermediate and advanced levels; and (3) Chinese, Japanese, and Russian: Intermediate and advanced levels.

Deadline varies by country.