Six hours a day, five days a week you can hear discussions about the day's news in Arabic or menu selections in Serbian, but hardly a word of English in the brick office building on Odenton.
It is the Inlingua School of Languages, which caters to government agencies and businesses with clients overseas and where students are immersed in the language they are learning.
The school, headquartered in Bern, Switzerland, opened the newest of its 270 worldwide offices last week in the Academy Junction Plaza on Piney Orchard Parkway near Route 175. It is the second Inlingua office in Maryland. The other is in Baltimore.
"We really believe there is a market out there," said Ed Nef, director of Inlingua's metropolitan Washington school in Roslyn, Va. "Annapolis is growing, and the Baltimore-Washington corridor is growing."
In addition to teaching languages, the school offers translation and interpretation services, and cross-cultural training. Many of its clients are government agencies, but Inlingua also hopes to cater to county companies that conduct business overseas.
"We use them at all levels," said Monica West of Greenmount Moving Storage, an Upper Marlboro company that helps representatives of hundreds of businesses throughout Maryland relocate overseas.
The Odenton office is "a real asset" because it is more convenient to the Annapolis area than Baltimore or Washington, she said.
Rosemary Duggins, spokeswoman for the Anne Arundel Economic Development Corp., said she hadn't heard of a need for language instruction but that the cross-cultural training could be in demand for county companies such as Nevamar Corp. and Wartsila Diesel, which send employees overseas.
"I see that as a real benefit as we see the global market getting smaller," said Ms. Duggins. "Cross-cultural training would be very valuable, especially for a novice. It's so easy to offend someone with never ever meaning to."
The school offers classes in Arabic, French, Serbian and Spanish at the Odenton office. But Inlingua can offer 56 languages, all taught by native speakers.
The classes are small, usually with no more than six students. Rates vary from $28 to $40 an hour, depending on the class size and what is taught.
Individual instruction costs more than group lessons, and obscure languages such as Nepali and Tibetan are slightly more expensive than more familiar languages such as French, German or Spanish.
Courses can be as short as four weeks or as long as 24. No English is permitted during classes, except during translation drills.
In a typical class, students spend the first hour talking about current events or their daily routines. They also watch videos or listen to cassette tapes in the languages they are studying and spend an hour translating from magazines, books and newspapers.
Some weeks there are hourlong exams. And every night they are assigned about two hours of homework.
"One thing we like to stress here is that it's not a class you get bored in," said Antonio Tejada, 37, who has been teaching Spanish for 2 1/2 years at Inlingua. "We like to entertain, go out to lunch. . . . There is always something going on."
This week, the Serbian class of three visited Srpska Kruna, the Serbian Crown restaurant in Washington.
None of the Odenton students agreed to interviews, but teachers said they are mostly adults who are learning the language to pass a foreign service or diplomatic exam, or are preparing for a job involving translation.
"For these people, this is part of their job," said Mr. Tejada, a former paralegal who was born in the United States but grew up in Panama. "So they actually have to do good."
Serbian teacher Djina Satara said job requirements would be the main reason anyone would try to master her native language, which has seven cases and two alphabets.