The Foreign Language Collection

Located at the Headquarters Library
300 Maiden Lane, Fayetteville, NC 28301-5000
(910) 483-5022, FAX: (910) 483-8644

The Headquarters Library has over 45,000 foreign language books, sound recordings and videos located on the second floor. These materials can be borrowed as all other English language materials. More that 125 different languages are represented in the collection, and they are in the library's catalog of resources.

For 22 years, the library was the recipient of federal funds to develop a foreign language collection for the state of North Carolina. Although this federal program was discontinued, a few titles continue to be added each year.

A subscription program was established in 1998 with participating North Carolina public and other libraries to provide deposit collections and interlibrary loan services on a sliding scale. Funds from the subscriptions pay for this service, as well as contribute to the development of the collection.

Book Collections

The majority of books in the Center's collections are contemporary novels, plays, poetry, popular nonfiction, standard classics and children's works. The largest collections are in Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Spanish and Vietnamese, with modern collections in Arabic, Hungarian, Italian and Russian.

The Center maintains smaller collections in these languages:

Bengali, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Greek, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Marathi, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Swedish, Telugu, Thai, Urdu and Yiddish.

The Center also has representative collections in the following languages:

Cambodian, Catalan, Icelandic, Kannada, Knokani, Latin, Lithuanian, Malayalam, North American Indian languages, Panjabi, Romanian, Scots-Gaelic, Serbo-Croatian, Slovak, Slovenian, Tagalog (Filipino), Tamil and, Telugue, Ukrainian.

The collections also include dictionaries, grammars and other readings in additional languages ranging from Afrikaans and Armenian to Welsh and Zulu.

Audiovisual Collection

Sound Recordings: North Carolina Foreign Language Center offers a panorama of the world's folk and popular culture. Teachers and clubs can make especially good use of this recreational and educational material. The Center tries to have some type of audio material representing every country and linguistic group.

The collection concentrates on music and prose recordings in non-English languages in audio cassette and compact disc format. Folk and popular music predominate. The larger collections consist of Arabic, French, German, Hungarian, Korean, Japanese and Spanish music.

Afrikaans, Albanian, Amharic, Arabic, Armenian, Baluchi, Bulgarian, Burmese, Cambodian, Cherokee, Chinese (Cantonese & Mandarin), Czech, Danish, Delaward, Dutch, Esperanto, Finnish, Greek (modern), Haitian Creole, Hausa, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Irish Gaelic, Japanese, Korean, Latin, Lao, Luganda, Northern Sotho, Norwegian, Nyanja (Chinyanja), Persian, Scots-Gaelic, Serbo-Croatian, Shona, Sinhalese, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Vietnamese, Welsh, Xhosa, Yiddish, Yoruba and Zulu.

Most of these learning language learning kits are designed for tourists, while some are intended for long-term serious study of certain languages.

English as a Second Language (ESL)

The Center is an excellent resource for materials designed to teach English as a second or foreign language. The Center has records and tapes designed to help non-native speakers--from Arabic to Chinese to Spanish and Vietnamese--learn English. The Center has vocabulary aids, grammars and cultural aids in English as well as many other languages.