California DMV reverses decision to eliminate most foreign language options for driver tests

The California DMV will continue to offer written drivers license tests in 32 languages, reversing a decision from last week to drop 25 of the languages, according to its public affairs office.

The reversal comes after The Sacramento Bee published a story online Thursday relaying the contents of an April 27 memo that said the department was planning to eliminate most of the languages from its written tests as part of a modernization project.

The department had planned to offer the tests only in the seven languages required by a 1973 law known as the Dymally-Alatorre Bilingual Services Act, a change that would have excluded commonly spoken languages like Korean, Russian and Tagalog, among others.

“At the direction of the Governor’s Office, the DMV has reversed its recent decision to offer one type of driver’s license knowledge test in seven languages only,” the department’s public affairs office said in an email Friday afternoon.

The email, which didn’t identify the public affairs officer who sent it, said the change described in the memo was part of the department’s effort to streamline its processes “for a better customer experience through data-driven solutions.

“But sometimes numbers don’t tell the whole story and this is one of those instances,” the email continued. “While the seven languages chosen together cover more than 95 percent of DMV customers and is in compliance with the Dymally-Alatorre Bilingual Services Act, meeting the needs of non and limited English speaking customers is more important to the DMV.”

Two Democratic state lawmakers from Southern Californian held a press conference Friday morning, along with Korean American Federation of Los Angeles, in which they expressed their outrage over the DMV proposal.

Assemblyman Miguel Santiago of Los Angeles and Sen. Dave Min of Irvine each said they planned to pressure the DMV to reverse its decision, and pledged to ask Gov. Gavin Newsom for a change or to pass new legislation if needed.

“This is wrong, it’s unfair, it’s inequitable and it’s counterproductive,” Min said at the press conference.

Among those affected would be people who can speak English but might not know the language well enough to navigate a written drivers test, he said.

Newsom in 2019 appointed Steve Gordon, formerly a corporate executive at international conglomerate Cisco, to head a major modernization effort at the DMV.

Accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, the department has moved many services online that once required an office visit, and the department has begun accepting credit cards and other mobile wallet payment options, according to its website.

The DMV offers the test in the following languages: Amharic, Arabic, Armenian, Cambodian/Khmer, Chinese/Cantonese, Croatian, English, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hmong, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Laotian, Mandarin, Persian/Farsi, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Romanian, Russian, Samoan, Spanish, Tagalog/Filipino, Thai, Tongan, Turkish, and Vietnamese.

This story was originally published May 7, 2021 at 3:57 PM.