svrgn

I'm not a data scientist, but I tinker often enough to know a fair share of languages.

I would say learn A statistical computing language and a programming language. If you could mix the two (via apis or other) it becomes even better. I interface matlab+c and Ruby+R, the former for speed and performance, the latter to prototype.

Learn something statistical, be it R/Octave/Stata/Matlab. If you have a budget, go with matlab as there are lots of packages and scripts available, although R is catching up quick. If performance is an issue, R has caveats, since the vanilla version has no multithread support.

I don't know python and use C for everything, but there are so many packages for python, including (GPU accelerated) machine learning that it is IMO definitely the way to go in your case.