Bahrain expands traffic Safety in tongues

TDT | Manama

Email: mail@newsofbahrain.com

Bahrain has joined the Gulf’s multilingual safety push by issuing traffic advisories in Hindi, Malayalam and Bengali yesterday. The Ministry of Interior notices mark the Kingdom’s clearest step into expatriate-language traffic communication, aligning with a decade-long regional trend.

Regional precedents

Oman was the first Gulf state to make this move, releasing a nine-language road-safety brochure in 2011 that included Hindi, Malayalam, Urdu, Tamil, Telugu, Sinhalese, Tagalog and Bangla. Qatar followed in 2014, posting pedestrian-safety posters in six expatriate languages, among them Hindi and Malayalam.

The UAE began targeting expatriate audiences by 2012, when Abu Dhabi Police used Malayalam media to highlight accident risks. By 2022, the Ministry of Human Resources and Emiratisation was issuing worker-rights guides in seven languages, including Hindi and Malayalam, making a multilingual state guidance routine.

Expanding practice

Saudi Arabia widened its communication in 2020 with COVID-19 guidelines in Urdu, Filipino and other languages, and has since published Hajj kits in up to 16 tongues. Though most Saudi traffic notices remain in Arabic and English, the state has shown its capacity for broad multilingual outreach. Kuwait formalised its role on January 28th this year, launching a traffic-law awareness campaign in six expatriate languages including Hindi, Bengali and Urdu.

Bahrain’s move

Bahrain has historically communicated in Arabic and English, with bilingual proclamations dating back to the 1930s. During the 2020 pandemic, the Information Ministry ran a multilingual awareness campaign in seven global languages. Today’s three traffic advisories in Hindi, Malayalam and Bengali represent a new step that acknowledges the linguistic reality of Bahrain’s expatriate workforce.

Shared lesson

The Gulf’s experience shows that life-saving messages reach their target only when issued in the languages workers understand best. From Oman’s early brochures to Qatar’s posters, the UAE’s targeted campaigns, Saudi Arabia’s multilingual health kits, Kuwait’s recent traffic drive and now Bahrain’s triple-language advisories, the region is converging on a simple truth - safety requires speaking every community’s language. With its August 22 notices, Bahrain has signalled that expatriate languages are no longer an afterthought but a central pillar of public safety.