Language barrier

Typically, little communication between speakers of different languages occurs unless one or both parties learn a new language, which requires an investment of much time and effort. People travelling abroad often encounter a language barrier.

The people who come to a new country at an adult age or have a limited vocabulary, when language learning is a cumbersome process, can have particular difficulty "overcoming the language barrier" . Similar difficulties occur at multinational meetings, where interpreting services can be costly, hard to obtain, and prone to error.

In 1995, 24,000 of the freshmen entering the California State University system reported English was their second language; yet only 1,000 of these non-active speakers of English tested proficient in college-level English (Kahmi – Stein & Stein, 1999). Numbers such as these make it evident that it is crucial for instruction librarians to acknowledge the challenges that language can present. Clearly use of English is a key complicating factor in international students' use of an American university library. Language difficulties affect not only information-gathering skills but also help-seeking behaviors. Lack of proficiency in English can be a major concern for international students in their library use as it relates to asking for and receiving assistance. Lee (1991), herself a former international student, explains that international students tend to be acquiescent and believe that school is the one place in the English-speaking world where they should be able to compete on an equal basis. International students are receptive and strongly motivated. For international students, concerned with proper sentence structure and precise vocabulary, this alteration of words and positions can be much more baffling than it is to native English speakers. The use of synonyms, a necessity in keyword searching, is difficult to master, especially for students with limited English vocabulary (F. Jacobson, 1988). In 2012, The Rosetta Foundation declared April 19 the international "No Language Barrier Day". The idea behind the day is to raise international awareness about the fact that it is not languages that represent barriers: languages should not be removed, they are not a barrier – to the contrary, they should be celebrated. It is access to translation services that is the barrier preventing communities from accessing and sharing information across languages. The annual celebration of this day aims to raise awareness about and to grow global community translation efforts. Expressions can overcome language barrier. Art of expression is beyond the barriers of language. Language barriers can also be a concern for those seeking healthcare as the patient-physician communication can be compromised. Patients unable to understand or communicate their concerns with their doctors often experience decreased quality in healthcare. These differences can be overcome via methods such as translation services or language classes for physicians (Rand, 1998).

Language barriers also influence migration. Emigrants from a country are far more likely to move to a destination country which speaks the same language as the emigrant's country. Thus, most British emigration has been to Australia, Canada, the United States, or New Zealand, most Spanish emigration has been to Latin America, and Portuguese emigration to Brazil. Even if the destination country does not speak the emigrant's language, it is still more likely to receive immigration if it speaks a language related to that of the emigrant. The most obvious example is the great migration of Europeans to the Americas. The United States, with its dominant Germanic English language, attracted primarily immigrants from Northern Europe, where Germanic tongues were spoken or familiar. The most common backgrounds in the United States are German, Irish, and English, and the vast majority of Scandinavian emigrants also moved to the United States (or English-speaking Canada). Southern Europeans, such as Italians, were more likely to move to Latin American countries; today, people of Italian descent are the second-largest ethnic background in Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil, after Spanish and (in Brazil) Portuguese, but rank fourth in the United States among European groups. In the past decade, Romanians have primarily chosen Italy and Spain as emigration destinations, with Germany, the largest Western European country, ranking a distant third.

• SIL discusses "language as a major barrier to literacy" if a speaker's language is unwritten.[7]

It is sometimes assumed that when multiple languages exist in a setting, there must therefore be multiple language barriers. Multilingual societies generally have lingua francas and traditions of its members learning more than one language, an adaptation; while not entirely removing barriers of understanding, it belies the notion of impassable language barriers.[8]

For example, there are an estimated 250 different languages spoken in London alone, but members of every ethnic group on average manage to assimilate into British society and be productive members of it.[9]

Language barriers can affect access to healthcare. For example, a study showed that British-Pakistani women who faced cultural and language barriers were less likely to attend breast screening because they were not aware that it takes place in a female-only environment.[10][11][12]

• Multilingualism
• International auxiliary language

• An Interlingua website
• An Esperanto website
• An Ido website