Critical Need - Heritage Language Speakers

Heritage Language Recruiting Program

August 19th, 2008

The Heritage Language Recruiting Program (HLRP) is available for men and women who live in communities that hold true the heritage and speak the language of their native people to increase the Navy’s capacity in critical foreign languages. If you are eligible (it is available for active and reserve service) for this program you must understand that after your initial training your duty assignments may require regular interaction with the language/dialect-specific general population of your heritage. You will normally be stationed at a parent unit in a specific global area or be assigned as an Individual Augmentee (IA) to a unit identified for deployment to the area of your expertise.

You must meet all basic enlistment eligibility requirements (except for the ASVAB requirement, you may enlist with AFQT scores of 21 or higher). You must be an upstanding individual, a person of integrity and have the loyalty necessary to be considered trustworthy for an assignment which will in all likelihood have you interacting directly with people of a foreign land as a representative of the United States Government. You can enlist into any job in the Navy you qualify for but you will be encouraged to pursue a job in which your language skill would most likely be needed like cryptology, information warfare, intelligence, and the Seabees (construction).

You will take and must pass the Defense Language Proficiency Test (DLPT) or an Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) in the target language at Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR).

Navy requires increased capacity in the following foreign languages and dialects. There is a need for all of these mentioned in the list, all languages are equally relevant. So if your a native speaker in Baluchi, Pashtu, Kurdish, Somali, Punjabi, Urdu, Indonesian, Hindi, Persian Iranian (Farsi), Persian Afghan (Dari), Arabic (to include these regional dialects - Algerian, Egyptian, Gulf, Lebanese, Libyan, Maghrebi, Modern Standard Arabic, Moroccan, North Levantine, Sudanese and Syrian), Tausug/Moro, Chechen, Tamil, Malay and Swahili contact your local Navy Recruiter!