You’re probably designing for a mixed language user group right now. Does your content reflect that?
Language should be considered a dimension of accessibility, especially for content that:
Content designers have to consider:
Our home language is “the first language we learn to speak and is generally the language of our parents and community. Sometimes we can have multiple home languages.” (Kerryn Dixon, Voices Magazine)
Our additional languages are languages we use in addition to our home languages.
Our home language is sometimes called our first language. The description ‘native language’, to mean home language, is becoming less common because of its colonial links.
Our additional languages are sometimes called our second, third or fourth languages.
Linguistic accessibility is important because people in a group often speak more than one language with various degrees of confidence. People also use different varieties of the same language or create their own variety.
The way a language develops in a multilingual group reflects what people need and want to communicate.
Here are three examples.
1. You are designing a content strategy for a healthcare app available in 100+ countries. It was created in Lagos and the company has a team of 53 based in Lagos and Noida. Most of the employees have 2-3 home languages. They switch between languages depending on who they're communicating with. When the Noida and Lagos teams meet, and when they communicate with partners, they often use English.
2. You are designing a booking and payment service for customers of a catering business in Liverpool. The customers have a variety of home languages and are all based in England. The company uses English as their language of business. All but three of the 27 employees have English as a home language.
3. You are designing an internal social media site for a bank headquartered in Frankfurt. Their 10k+ international employees use English as their language of business. About 5% of the workforce have English as a home language. Everyone has adapted to the workplace's variety of English, which includes Singaporean acronyms and US idioms.
In all three cases, people using your product or service are also using an additional language. You need to think about the most accessible language choices for each group.
And in all three examples, stakeholders in the company will have different – and perhaps strongly held – beliefs about people’s linguistic needs. You need equally strong evidence of people’s linguistic needs to show the value of your design choices.
Here are two examples from past projects, which I’ve anonymised.
Ute is an engineer and company director. Her home languages are German and Turkish. She lives in Munich and works remotely and internationally. She mainly uses English to communicate technical knowledge and strategy with mixed language groups. Her technical vocabulary is accurate and exceeds a lot of home language speakers' knowledge. Her English grammar is limited to simple tenses, which serves her well in most situations, but she feels anxious when using English socially or in new situations.
Abshir is a small business owner. His home languages are Somali and Arabic and he lives in Edinburgh. He does most of his work in person, as well as some remote work with international traders. He uses English and Scots to trade, socialise and do everyday tasks with people who have English and Scots as home languages. His grammar and vocabulary are strong and he rarely struggles or feels stressed when he communicates in English. He needs time or repetition to understand fast-spoken language and complex grammar, especially when multitasking.
Both people are skilled communicators in their additional languages. However, they’ve built different skills based on their needs.
Evidence-led examples like these will help you to:
A few years ago, I surveyed 25 people working in two North African cities. They all used French as a language of business. The group had 13 home languages between them.
These were their answers to two of my questions.
When I communicate in my additional language for 4-8 hours, I am:
People can help me by:
These are the lessons I learned:
The methods we use to make content more accessible for people who:
can also be helpful for people operating in their additional language.
I recommend brainstorming with your team, then deciding which methods can also apply to linguistically-diverse groups.
Next, here's what we came up with in a brainstorm at SPARCK:
When we read, watch, or listen to content in an additional language, we use strategies to understand.
These strategies are as diverse as we are. But there are some strategies people use frequently.
In another piece of research, I spoke to 15 people based in Asia and Europe. These were the strategies they used in additional languages:
A person might get the meaning of an unknown word from its context. Another person might use an app to translate the same piece of language.
Translation is helpful if we don’t have enough of a language to understand the whole meaning. But translation can be misleading or useless if the language includes local words, phrasal verbs, idioms, or metaphor.
Someone in a public space like a train station, bank or border security queue might observe other people’s actions to fill linguistic gaps.
Research is a good time to learn people’s strategies and use that knowledge to inform your design. I recommend noticing, and noting, your own strategies when you use an additional language.
Here are some quick wins if you’re designing in English language. If you design in another language, tell us about your quick wins in the comments:
These quick wins are for guidance.
Content designers make decisions based on lots of evidence, and you might decide that another option works better for the people who use your design.
These suggestions require more time and effort but can deliver sustained results and change in your organisational culture: