The United States is best described as a kaleidoscope of cultures, a country where more than 350 languages coexist. Nearly 68.8 million Americans, about 1 in 5, speak a language other than English at home. Yet, English remains the primary language used in weather and climate communication during environmental disasters.
This raises an important question: if our country embraces multiple languages, why does our emergency communication system rely on only one? This presentation explores how multilingual speakers receive, understand, and respond to extreme weather events, drawing on years of fieldwork and survey research. The talk will draw on both risk communication, intercultural communication, and geography scholarship to situate multilingual speakers within the intersecting contexts of risk, place, and environment. This unique intersection can better explain how language disparities can amplify and put certain populations at heightened risk of harm when disasters strike.
The talk will also spotlight a multi-year collaboration with the National Weather Service that merged AI translation with GIS mapping, transforming how warnings are delivered to multilingual communities across the United States. Overall, this work invites us to see language not as a barrier, but as a bridge to resilience in the face of weather and climate extremes.