Karl A. Krippes is blunt when he explains why he decided to learn to speak Uzbek seven years ago. It was the money.
"I was told that there was some scholarship money available for Uzbek, so I decided to study that," Dr. Krippes said. "Then there was some scholarship money for Mongolian, so I learned that, too.
"But I never imagined in school that there would be the market for these languages like there is today," said Dr. Krippes, who earned his doctorate in Central Asian studies from Indiana University in 1992.
The 35-year-old Owen Brown resident -- who speaks eight languages and writes an additional six -- now seeks to earn more money by capitalizing on the urgent need of companies and government agencies to learn the languages of the republics of the former Soviet Union.
"It's possible to still get by in Russian in most of these countries, but it won't be for much longer," said Dr. Krippes, who has founded a company called Glossotronics to develop instructional software and teach classes on the Central Asian languages.
In Kazakhstan, for instance, the society likely will continue to function in both Kazakh and Russian. But the ability to speak and write Kazakh would be a big advantage for companies seeking to do business in the oil-rich republic, said Khadisha Dairova, the third secretary at the Kazakhstan Embassy in Washington.
In addition to Kazakh, Dr. Krippes speaks Kyrgyz, Korean, Greek and Russian. His written languages include classical and modern Mongolian, Persian and Macedonian.
Dr. Krippes said that he could not specifically discuss his most recent language work, identifying his clients only as government agencies.
Working out of the basement of his home, Dr. Krippes makes ends meet by translating newspaper articles and documents written in Kyrgyz, Kazakh and Uzbek while trying to build his company into more than a one-man operation.
He also has signed an agreement to do work for another Columbia company -- Translingua Inc. -- to translate the labels and instructions of products to be sold in republics of the former Soviet Union.
The name Glossotronics came from Dr. Krippes' idea of creating electronic glossaries to teach these less-commonly-taught languages. As the year-old company moves beyond document translation and consultation, his challenge is to find an investor to finance the design and production of a multimedia self-instructional computer program.
With two textbooks already on computer diskette, Dr. Krippes said he needs the money to hire a programmer to design a teaching program around the information. "I've been studying the features of commercially available programs for the more common languages, and I think I could put together a helpful, self-instructional program for the less-commonly-taught ones," he said.
By sometime next year, Dr. Krippes also would like to assemble a group of language teachers and establish an institute in Columbia for intensive instruction of the languages.
Proudly displaying the Kazakh-English and Uzbek-English dictionaries that he has already published, he talks of making Columbia into a center for instruction of the languages of the republics of the former Soviet Union.
"It could be a centralized, local place to teach languages for government agencies and business," Dr. Krippes said.