About OPI Pay Scale in the Military

The U.S. military prizes education, with proficiency in foreign languages being a high priority. It therefore offers extra pay to enlisted and commissioned personnel who can achieve and maintain fluency as certified by the testing. One of these tests is the Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI), but it is actually one of the least frequently applied language exams used by the Department of Defense.

Foreign Language Proficiency Pay

An Army civil affairs center in Iraq, which needs Arabic speakers.

The military offers what it calls Foreign Language Proficiency Pay (FLPP) to serving members who are certified as having high written and spoken proficiency in foreign languages. Officers and enlisted personnel are eligible. To qualify for FLPP, the serviceperson must meet at least one of the following requirements: be a career military linguist, be trained in a foreign language by the Department of Defense (DOD), be in possession of language skills that the DOD regards as being of critical value and be in an assignment where the language skills are actively used. In addition, the serviceperson must have passed the relevant DOD exam. Certification by exam must be renewed annually.

Main Test

The main test format for certification is the Defense Language Proficiency Test (DLPT) and Defense Language Reading Proficiency Test (DLRPT). There two are similar tests, with the DLPT covering 42 languages and the DLRPT covering four. The languages are Ahmaric, Albanian, Arabic, Bahsa Indonesian, Bulgarian, Burmese, Chinese (Amoy, Cantonese and Mandarin are handled separately), Czech, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Haitian-Creole, Hausa, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Khmer, Korean, Lao, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese (both Brazilian and European), Romanian, Russian, Serbo-Croat, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese and Yiddish.

OPI

The Oral Proficiency Interview is a catch-all examination meant to cover all languages that the Department of Defense does not have a standard examination for. It is given by the Defense Language Institute.

Pay

FLPP is paid on a monthly basis and works something like a raise for those who have achieved the necessary conditions. The exact pay depends on whether or not the speaker is a career military linguist and the language spoken. Career linguists are paid more for their skills, and some languages are more valued by the DOD than others. Furthermore, a serviceperson may attempt to claim more than one language certification. In 2009, the minimum was $300 per month, and the maximum (regardless of the number of languages spoken) was $1,000 per month.

DLAB

Soldiers, sailors and Marines seeking to cash in on the FLPP, but who are not already fluent in a foreign tongue, can take the Defense Language Aptitude Battery (DLAB). If they score well, they will be permitted to go to school and learn a useful language. A passing score is 95, which qualifies you to go on and learn basic European languages like French or Spanish. At the top is a score of 115 or higher, which qualifies you to learn Japanese, Arabic, Chinese and Korean.

Resources

• Defense Language Institute