Some of the hottest, trending languages are Kazakh, Swahili and Pashto. Well, at least for the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC), sometimes that’s true.
It’s probably safe to say that no organization is more interested in what foreign nationals are saying and writing than the IC. This is especially true for what’s being said in widely spoken languages of U.S. adversaries, like China and Russia. However, it’s also the case for “low resource” languages that are spoken by much smaller populations around the globe, like Kazakh, Swahili and Pashto.
The perennial challenge the IC has faced is how to quickly and accurately interpret those lesser-used languages or any language.