Language and Social Work: Are We Really Communicating Effectively?

Social workers pride themselves on knowing how to effectively communicate with their clients. From the beginning of our social work education, we develop a repertoire of skills, including relationship building, active listening, keen observation, and psychosocial assessment as well as cultural awareness and sensitivity. By the time we complete our education, we perceive ourselves to be prepared to communicate effectively with clients from a wide variety of backgrounds. However, due to forces of worldwide globalization, international networking, and global transmigration, the odds that a social worker will have clients who are multinational, multilingual and multicultural are exponentially greater, testing our abilities to interact meaningfully with these clients. Although social workers have clearly made great strides in the area of cultural competence in recent decades, we may have only scratched the surface of developing our skills in the area of effective linguistic communication with the populations that we serve. Although the exact number of languages found in the United States today is unknown, Ethnologue estimates the number to be 245 (Lewis, 2009). A U.S. Census report of "Language Use in the United States: 2007" (Shin & Kominski, 2010) published around the same period, however, lists only 39 individual languages and language families (for example, groups of related languages). From a sample of 281 million people, 55.4 million (20 percent) used a non-English language at home. The largest segment of this population spoke Spanish (62 percent), and the remaining 38 percent used diverse languages, including, but not limited to, Portuguese, Korean, Greek, Serbo-Croation, Japanese, Navajo, Arabic, and Tagalog. In the past 30 years, the number of speakers of Russian, Persian, Armenian, and Vietnamese in the United States has more than doubled. Noticeably absent from the U.S. Census report was any mention of American Sign Language (ASL) or any other manual-visual language. Estimates of the number of users of ASL range from 100,000 to 15,000,000, although to date, there has been no systematic research on the prevalence of ASL use in U.S. homes (Mitchell, Young, Bachleda, & Karchmer, 2006). Incomplete though they are, these statistics underscore the complex reality of the U.S. contemporary language environment. Multilingualism poses both challenges and opportunities for practitioners to improve their strategies for assisting others in need. In recent decades, social workers have taken a greater interest in learning languages like Spanish, French, and German, but mastery of less commonly taught languages has eluded us. Nevertheless, social workers are adept at navigating linguistic divides. The following case examples illustrate some of the dilemmas confronted and solutions developed by social workers in a variety of practice situations. CASE EXAMPLES Case 1: Haitian Creole A large AIDS organization had an influx of Haitian clients who were HIV positive and needed assistance. Although the agency was located in a state with a large Haitian immigrant population, there were no case managers who understood the Haitian Creole language. A search for a qualified individual was quickly launched but took a year to complete. In the interim, interpreters, often English-speaking family members, were enlisted to assist in communicating with the clients as well as with organizations such as food pantries, hospitals, and transportation agencies that provided resources to the clients. Despite this assistance, it was not until an ethnically Haitian case manager fluent in Haitian Creole was hired that the AIDS organization was truly able to provide a full range of services that were linguistically unmediated by interpreters and fully protective of individual privacy to this subset of clients. Case 2: Cajun English Another instance that illustrates the communicative challenges we sometimes face as social workers occurred in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when evacuees were transported out of New Orleans to surrounding states. …