Multilingual Wireless Emergency Alerts

On October 19, 2023, the FCC adopted requirements that Participating Commercial Mobile Service Providers support template Wireless Emergency Alert (WEA) messages in the 13 most commonly spoken languages in the United States, as well as English and American Sign Language (ASL). The languages to be supported are: ASL, Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Haitian Creole, Hindi, Italian, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Tagalog, and Vietnamese. These templates would be pre-installed and stored on WEA-capable mobile devices. Where an alerting authority chooses to send a multilingual Alert Message, the WEA-capable mobile device must be able to extract and display the relevant template in the subscriber’s default language, if available. If the default language for a WEA-capable mobile device is set to a language that is not among those supported by templates, the WEA-capable device must present the English-language version of the Alert Message.

The Commission directed the Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau to develop the specific implementation parameters for template-based multilingual alerting. On February 15, 2024, the Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau released a Public Notice seeking comment on those implementation parameters, including proposed static and form-fillable templates for selected WEA messages translated into the required languages. These proposed templates are available below. Each of these templates, including the demonstrative ASL videos, are not final and are presented solely for the purpose of seeking comment on what the final templates should be. Participating Commercial Mobile Service Providers and emergency managers should not implement these proposed templates at this time.

Participating CMS Providers are required to support template-based multilingual alerts within 30 months after the Bureau publishes its implementation order in the Federal Register.

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