San Francisco recognises Vietnamese as official language
The San Francisco City Board of Supervisors (USA) on June 11 voted unanimously to declare Vietnamese as an official language in the city, requiring translation services for government announcements, reported the San Francisco Chronicle.
The move, alongside other changes to San Francisco’s language access ordinance, is part of efforts to expand public services to nearly 6,800 primarily Vietnamese speakers locally.
The decision is to ensure that San Francisco authorities must translate all the city government's announcements into Vietnamese for the community there, said the San Francisco Chronicle .
The draft ordinance was introduced last year by District 10 Supervisor Shamann Walton, who said the city needed to expand language access to ensure its immigrant communities can participate in the government process.
“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,” he said.
Promoting services in languages other than English is considered important to meet the requirements of fairness in accessing welfare and benefits of immigrants. Currently, there are still some African or Caribbean communities that have difficulty using services in San Francisco.
San Francisco has so far recognized Chinese, Spanish, Philippine and Vietnamese as its official languages in the city.
