(FORTUNE Magazine) – Wilkommen to language school. Sorry about the crowd, but this industry is booming. Berlitz, which leads the field in teaching foreign tongues to executives, reports business enrollments shot up 49% from 1987 to 1992. Second-place Inlingua, which is privately owned, says it is flourishing as well. Half its executive students are women, up from about zero 15 years ago. What's the attraction? Surprisingly, a lot of U.S. executives are studying foreign languages to stay home and conduct business with waves of new immigrants, especially Hispanics. Greater interest in Spain, because of its membership in the EC, and in Mexico, because of the opportunities NAFTA might offer, have also helped make Spanish Berlitz's most popular language in the * U.S. No. 1 worldwide is English. The Pac Rim may embrace some of the fastest-growing economies, but the popularity of its languages is lagging, at least in the commercial schools. Executives may be studying Japanese, sometimes called the devil's language for its difficulty, in nearby universities. Enthusiasm for Chinese was damaged by the government's suppression of demonstrators in Tiananmen Square. The fall of the Berlin Wall has raised demand for German, which is becoming Eastern Europe's lingua franca, while French, by comparison, remains stalled. Some say the French like it that way. -- A.R.