Here’s a “duh” moment: the United States is incredibly diverse, with 13.5 percent of the population consisting of foreign-born immigrants as of 2016. The U.S. is also home to the largest diaspora communities, ranging from Ethiopia to China.
Yet even with these numbers, much of the U.S. still operates effectively as a monolingual place – especially when it comes to transportation. Even most airports – spare a few international hubs – lack signage for people who don’t speak English.
On the public-transportation front, there is a range of language accessibility across transit agencies, from lacking any signage to having multilingual fare machines and announcements. Even though many transit systems have created pamphlets for bus routes for many different languages, it isn’t always easy to find this information. There comes a point when the number of speakers of a language other than English should warrant some sort of signage in said language.
In a case study of immigrants using New Jersey Transit, a majority said they understood basic information, but had difficulty understanding English-only announcements. To ease the language barrier, those studied suggested a combination of multilingual signs, announcements, and pictograms.
The Washington, DC metropolitan region is very multilingual, with a large Spanish-speaking population concentrated in areas like Arlington, Alexandria, and Langley Park. Some bus routes and announcements are made in English and Spanish regularly, occasionally also having announcements or advertising in a different language such as Amharic in Silver Spring or Mandarin in Fairfax and Rockville, owing to those large immigrant communities. Big shutdowns on the Metro have prompted some signage in English and Spanish describing the workarounds.
The problem is that outside of advertising on transit, for the most part there isn’t much navigational signage for people who don’t speak English. While it doesn’t make sense to ask every bus operator to be multilingual, there are ways to mitigate the language barrier in situations where written signs may not be as sensible, such as more visual symbology easily understood by people of all backgrounds.
In fact, symbols are at the core of Mexico City’s Metro, with an icon symbolizing each station, as many people were illiterate in Spanish when the system was built. It is important to note that pictograms should be only one component of the larger picture.
Some big box stores near large immigrant neighborhoods are going full speed ahead with efforts to target the Hispanic community, with bilingual signage and services. Places that have multilingual services are able to engage with more customers than those who only have monolingual service.
It’s not only a pragmatic and economic decision to have multilingual signage: it can be symbolic decision too, signaling openness to a diverse and cosmopolitan population. Washington, DC’s Chinatown has a requirement that all store signs show some Chinese titles on the outside. It seems tacky at first, especially given that the neighborhood has lost most of its Chinese population, but the messaging has an effect of creating a “heterotopia” where it signals to passerbys the importance of immigrant communities shaping of the various cities.
North of the border, Ontario has a law that stipulates if there is a large enough French presence that there needs to be a baseline of language services for a municipality and the province to provide. This also includes some amount of bilingual freeway signage.
If we were to take this approach to transit, local governments and state governments could theoretically stipulate thresholds to require multilingual signage at bus, train, light rail stops, bikeshare docks and fare machines, in tandem with a larger shift to make sure that visual language is also easily understandable across many cultures and languages.
Making it possible for people who don’t speak perfect English to use transit sends a signal to immigrants and tourists that they are welcome here.
Photo by dctourism/Flickr.
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