At Helen Gym’s announcement Monday to declare her run for City Council, Metro Chinese Weekly tweeted one of Gym's comments that didn’t register on anyone else’s radar:

"We want to fight so that English language proficiency is not a requisite for responsible government," Helen Gym. @ParentsUnitedPA #PHL2015

— Metro Chinese Weekly (@metrochinese) February 9, 2015

Considering that, 40 years ago, one of the current mayoral candidates fought to pass a bill that would allow Americans to vote in their native language, the question of linguistic access in politics should have some merit in this race. Are Philly politics an English-only affair? Do we apply Geno’s Steaks policy of “This is America, when ordering, speak English” to would-be voters trying to learn more about the candidates?

The city’s foreign-born population has grown significantly in the last two decades. The Chinese and Latino populations now make up about 20 percent of Philadelphia. In the big picture, according to a 2011 dataset, we have more than 20 different languages with at least 2000 speakers per language. They range from Gujrati (about 2,600 speakers) to Spanish (with about 137,000 speakers). At the end of the day, it should matter that more than 125,000 Philadelphians from various backgrounds speak English “less than very well.” There are plenty of studies to suggest that those numbers are on the rise.

With this in mind — and the fact that Philly welcomes its label as a global destination with a diverse constituency — it seems reasonable that the new wave of local politicians grant more political access to less-than-proficient English speakers. And yet none of the mayoral campaign websites have been translated, not even into Spanish.

Granted, it’s still early in the race. Some candidates (namely Milton Street) don’t even have their websites up yet. If the internet’s an educational dead-end for non-English speakers, whose team could hypothetically take a phone call in another language to explain the ins-and-outs of, say, their candidate’s education platform?

Danelsy Medrano, social media & design manager for Doug Oliver’s campaign, is a native of the Dominican Republic and speaks fluent Spanish.

Jim Kenney’s website is in beta stage right now and will be fully operational in a week. None of his staff are Latino, but according to Lauren Hitt, the campaign communications director, several of them are “proficient in Spanish.”

Nelson Diaz is the only bilingual candidate for mayor. Two of his staff are bilingual Spanish-English speakers as well. That said, it gives more reason for raised eyebrows that his website — besides being under construction for the first month of his candidacy — still isn’t translated. However, Judge Diaz told AL DÍA that he has already translated all of his platforms, and they will be released issue-by-issue in English and Spanish. Diaz also added that Ian Rivera, his campaign manager, is the first Puerto Rican to run a major political campaign in a major American city. “That’s going to be historic when we win,” he said.

But it’s Anthony Williams who gets the award for multilingual accessibility. There are four members of the Anthony Williams campaign who speak more languages fluently than the previous campaign teams combined. Between them there are three Spanish, two Arabic, one French, one German, one Hindi, and one Gujrati speaker.

Various member of Lynne Abraham's team either speak or know some Spanish, French, Mandarin, Italian, German, Arabic and Albanian. They are hoping to have a Spanish translation of the website in the near future.

We reached out to the campaign team of Milton Street, but haven’t gotten their response yet. This article will be updated with any new information.