The San Francisco Board of Supervisors has voted unanimously to make Vietnamese an official language, joining Chinese, Spanish, and Filipino as languages in which the city is required to provide translated services.
The city’s language access ordinance, enacted in 2001, which previously required city departments to translate services into any language with at least 10,000 speakers in the city who have limited English proficiency, was amended to lower the threshold to 6,000, allowing the inclusion of Vietnamese. Nealy 7,000 San Francisco residents identify as primarily Vietnamese speakers. Now, the city will provide telephonic interpretations, website text, written notices, and other official services in Vietnamese.
The legislation was introduced last year by district supervisor Shamann Walton, who said at a news conference, “San Francisco is home to many diverse immigrant communities and is a national leader in providing language-access services, with one of the strongest and most comprehensive local language-access laws.”
The amendments also encourage city departments to increase bilingual staffing levels and require departments to maintain lists of bilingual employees and their languages.
