Bilingual road signs welcomed amid call for wider Spanish adoption

A government move to install bilingual road signs has drawn support while prompting calls for a national push to make Spanish widely spoken in Barbados, including changes in schools, media and public life.

Barbados’ Ambassador to CARICOM David Comissiong welcomed the Ministry of Transport and Works’ installation of bilingual road signs across the island, describing the move as “a positive step in the right direction” that should “be congratulated and encouraged”.

Transport minister Kirk Humphrey said the new signs are part of a broader upgrade of signage throughout the country. But he stopped short of saying how many bilingual signs will be installed and where.

There have been several moves to have Spanish adopted as Barbados’s second language since the 1980s, but its introduction has languished outside schools. While Prime Minister Mia Mottley set a target for every Barbadian under 18 to have exposure to Spanish by 2030 and launched initiatives like SOMOS (Spanish Opens More Opportunities), English remains the country’s sole official language.

Ambassador Comissiong said the introduction of Spanish signage must serve as a springboard for a far more comprehensive national effort to establish Spanish as the nation’s second language.

Adopting Spanish is a simple matter of practical necessity given the country’s geographic location, he said.

“We live in a hemisphere in which Spanish is by far the predominant language,” he said, warning that “the fact that we as a people are generally not proficient in the Spanish language puts us at a disadvantage in dealing with much of our hemisphere, our neighbourhood”.

While noting that the new bilingual signage “would be a comfort and of some assistance to Spanish-speaking visitors”, he insisted that the country must look far beyond basic road markers if it intends to achieve true cultural and economic integration within the Americas. 

“Let this putting up of bilingual English and Spanish language road signs be the precursor to many more initiatives.”

To build genuine fluency across society, he outlined a strategy for public education and media exposure. He called for “a much more organised and determined effort on our part to facilitate our people learning Spanish as a second language”, suggesting that language immersion should begin in early childhood through everyday media exposure.

The ambassador suggested introducing Spanish cartoons, children’s literature, and broadcasting Spanish music across national airwaves. He also advocated expanding language teaching across the formal school system and community-based programmes, as well as using national television and online platforms for televised language lessons.

“There is so much that we could do if we are really serious about making Spanish the second language of Barbadians,” he emphasised.

The discussion also addressed regional infrastructure, with the envoy to CARICOM backing the idea that CARICOM should develop standardised visual icons and international route symbols across member states to assist non-English-speaking drivers. He said such measures align with the primary objective of regional integration.

“CARICOM is all about us coming together to treat our geographic space as one domestic space,” Ambassador Comissiong explained. He argued that CARICOM should adopt a simple method for identifying successful national policies and scaling them up across the entire bloc.

“Our modus operandi should be to take hold of that best practice and seek to apply it right across the region,” he said, adding that CARICOM must focus on “going about in a very organised way to lift all of our standards across the region”.

Beyond transport and regional standardisation, he pointed to the educational potential of using public signage, markers and historic sites to highlight Barbados’ historical ties with its neighbours, such as the significant Barbadian contribution to the construction of the Panama Canal.

Reflecting on global examples, he noted that in cities like Washington, DC, “almost every public building is a history lesson”, asserting that Barbados could do far more in “using our landscape and our built landscape to tell our story and to educate our people”.

This focus on the built landscape prompted the noted pan-Africanist writer and thinker to reflect on the historical treatment of plantation sites, where he expressed concern about viewing places of historical trauma solely as venues for commercial recreation.

“I think that we owe a duty to ourselves to take steps to, in a sense, redeem those plantations,” he said. He insisted that historic sites must actively research and display their past, urging that “we need to identify heroic acts of resistance relevant to each of these plantations, and we need to record in a visual format… we need to memorialise those heroic acts and the ancestors”.

Commending sites like Bayley’s Plantation for preserving the history of resistance to slavery, Ambassador Comissiong warned that failing to confront this past does a direct “disservice to our ancestors and ourselves”.

He also reflected on the diplomatic and human value of multilingualism, observing that making an effort to learn and display another nation’s language sends a message of respect and hemispheric solidarity.

“Anyone who goes to a country where the people speak a different language, if the people of that country see you making an effort to speak their language, that causes them to have a much greater appreciation for you. By trying to speak their language, you are, in a sense, honouring them… you’re saying that you consider them to be people of worth.”

The CARICOM envoy maintained that the ministry’s initiative carries no downsides, offering only benefits for domestic development and international relations.

“There are many, many positives associated with this initiative by the ministry, and I don’t see any negatives. They’re positive for us Barbadian people, and they’re positive in terms of developing our relationship with our Spanish-speaking brothers and sisters of this hemisphere.”

(RR)