Decolonizing Language Resources in The Human-Machine Era

Abstract

AbstractThis essay engages with the issue of future developing language technologies. In recent policy publications that attempt to predict and document an increasingly technologized linguistic future, we see a set of assumptions and presuppositions at work that we approach from a decolonial perspective. We use a sociolinguistically inspired lens of critical engagement with colonialist premises underlying these ideologies and beliefs in universal technological progress in the arena of language and communication. Based on decolonial insights, we make a critical reading of, and an allegorical comparison to, these premises, and ask whether a pluralistic, decolonial view of the role of language/language resources in society could aid in counteracting potential automatic reproductions of existing macro- and micro-sociolinguistic inequalities embodied in future language devices as described and forecast in the LITHME (Languages in the Human-Machine Era) report, Microsoft Corporation’s Responsible Artificial Intelligence Principles and the Digital Language Vitality Scale, three examples of recent publications on this topic. We frame critical rejoinders, from the theoretical perspectives of linguistic imperialism, the sociolinguistics of globalization, and languaging theory, with the aim to address future linguistic and sociolinguistic outcomes in the human-machine era in a decoloniality-inspired manner. We conclude that persistent beliefs in the inevitability of technological progress will continue to underpin and drive dominant Western interests in a digital future, and, unless radical reappraisal and reprioritization take place, these will continue to systematically disadvantage speakers in many locales across the globe. We end by encouraging continued critical linguistic reflection in this area in the future.keywords: Artificial intelligenceaugmented reality devicescritiquedecolonialitylanguage technologieslanguaginglinguistic imperialism AcknowledgementsWe acknowledge here the assistance we have had along the way in the creation of this essay. Much of its theoretical apparatus is owed to a course at Roskilde University in the autumn of 2021 called Knowledges for the Humanities, taught by Stephen Carney and Julia Suárez-Krabbe, among others. The essay has also benefited immensely from input from the editor and two anonymous reviewers for this journal. We thank them for their contributions, and all remaining errors are our own.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 In terms of our own positionality, we are ourselves writers from the West, from Europe and specifically from Denmark, a wealthy and highly digitalized country, with 94 percent of citizens online and particularly strong digital public services (Invest in Denmark Citation2017).2 Mundialización versus globalization, according to Mignolo (Citation2012, 279), encapsulates, among other things, a distinction between local histories and global designs.3 Lingua franca is to be understood as a common code used by people who do not all share mother tongues.4 “Translocality is a variety of enduring, open, and non-linear processes, which produce close interrelations between different places and people. These interrelations and various forms of exchange are created through migration flows and networks that are constantly questioned and reworked” (Peth Citation2018, para. 4).5 This is, however, not the position of the LITHME report’s comments on AR eye- and earpieces, since this technology ideally will allow individuals to speak their own native language, allowing communication without having to adjust to or submit to a dominant English lingua franca.