Providing access to help for non-native English speakers is a matter of pragmatism and empathy. However, as nonprofits, many of our clients cannot afford to support language translation for all of the languages spoken in their area.

When picking a subset of languages, it’s important to pay attention not just to the absolute number of languages speakers, but also the number within each language that have Limited English Proficiency (LEP). This is important for two reasons:

1. More important than the absolute number of speakers for a given language is the number of people who can’t speak english. These are the Low English Proficiency speakers.
2. Populations with high rates of LEP represent not only the true number of people who need translation services directly, but also represent potential help seekers are less likely to know someone from their own community who is proficient enough with English to help them.

An example in Washington State.

Every state has statistics on which languages are spoken in a given area. For this example we’ll look at stats for Washington State: https://statisticalatlas.com/state/Washington/Languages

If we pick the top five languages by number of speakers it might look like this:

• Spanish
• Chinese
• Vietnamese
• Russian
• Tagalog

However, if we take the top five languages by LEP then it looks like this:

• Arabic
• Russian
• Tai-Kadai
• Afro-Asiatic
• Other Slavic

The only language in common is Russian.

Picking the most helpful languages.