Speak My Language

At the heart of living well is a universal need to be accepted, to belong and to feel personally fulfilled.  

We recently interviewed sixteen people who live with a range of disabilities, as well as carers or front-line workers, from ethnic communities across New South Wales. We wanted to understand what living well with a disability means from a culturally diverse perspective. Those who participated in the survey were from Vietnamese, Chinese, Arabic, Indian, Filipino, Nepali, West African and East African backgrounds.

Our beliefs about disability are shaped by the culture we come from and the language we speak. In a multicultural society like Australia, our rich cultural diversity complicates cross-cultural understandings of disability. In 2016, there were over 300 languages spoken in Australian homes, with more than one-fifth of Australians speaking a language other than English at home. While services attempt to keep up with this demand by providing information in different languages, there are cultural nuances that are often lost in translation.