The term covers a wide array of world languages (other than English), ranging from some of the world's largest and most influential, and holds international recognization such as Chinese, Russian, Arabic, Bengali, Hindi, Portuguese, Japanese, Persian, Urdu, Turkish, Swahili, Italian, and Tamil to smaller regional languages studied in the US mainly by area experts, such as Twi, spoken in West Africa, and Finnish.
These programs have been developed to encourage growth in the teaching of less commonly taught languages critical to national security such as Arabic, Persian, Hindi, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, and Russian.
The Council's mission is to increase the number of Americans who choose to learn one or more of the less commonly taught languages (LCTLs) as a means of enhancing cross-cultural communication among citizens of the United States .
The Council principally directs its efforts toward building a national architecture for the LCTL field and in making the field's resources easily accessible to language programs and individual learners around the United States.Other places that provide support for LCTLs are the National Language Resource Centers (United States), all of which focus on LCTLs in at least some capacity.
Another Language Resource Center, the Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition (CARLA), at the University of Minnesota has had many projects over the years that focus on LCTLs The LCTL project (no longer updated) created a large database of where LCTLs are taught in North American colleges/universities, k-12 schools, distance education, study abroad, and summer courses.