D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty’s administration soon will launch an aggressive campaign to hire more bilingual staff, addressing a long-standing dearth of dual-language employees in the D.C. government.

Though they make up 13 percent of the District’s population, Latinos are thought torepresent about 2 percent of D.C. employees — the percentage is less for the Vietnamese-, Korean-, Chinese- and Amharic-speaking populations. District law mandates equal access to customer service for many foreign-language speakers, but the government has fallen behind in its application.