In the age of AI, human language diversity is more vital than ever

Originally published in Manila Bulletin

We are racing to teach machines to understand human language. But what if the data we're feeding them represents only a tiny fraction of human expression? Our AI future, often portrayed as a pinnacle of intelligence, risks being culturally impoverished and fundamentally biased if we don't act now. The fight to preserve the world’s endangered languages is not a nostalgic look backward; it is an urgent, forward-looking necessity to build a truly intelligent and equitable technological world.

The core problem is a severe data famine. Large language models and AI systems are trained on terabytes of text and speech scraped from the internet. This content is overwhelmingly in English, Mandarin, Spanish, and a handful of other dominant languages. This creates a dangerous feedback loop: AI is built on a narrow linguistic foundation, becomes proficient only in those tongues, and then amplifies their dominance across the digital landscape. The result is a form of technological colonialism. AI that cannot understand the nuanced grammar of an Indigenous language or the cultural concepts embedded within it will inevitably fail—and even harm—the communities that speak it. Imagine a healthcare chatbot missing a vital symptom description because it doesn’t recognize the local dialect, or a legal AI misinterpreting a testimony given in a minority language. This isn't just inefficiency; it's a perpetuation of bias on a massive scale.

Conversely, linguistic diversity is a untapped wellspring of intelligence for AI. Each language is a unique repository of human thought, containing distinct ways of classifying the natural world, conceptualizing time, and understanding social relationships. For an AI to be truly robust and creative, it needs exposure to this vast cognitive diversity. The structures found in a language with complex spatial awareness or evidentiality markers (which specify the source of information) could lead to breakthroughs in AI reasoning, making systems more nuanced, context-aware, and less prone to error. Preserving these languages isn’t about saving relics; it’s about preserving the essential data needed to solve future problems we can’t yet anticipate.

Therefore, the tech industry must see language preservation not as philanthropy, but as a core strategic imperative. We must challenge tech giants to invest a fraction of their vast resources into language preservation as a non-negotiable part of their AI ethics and development strategy. This means funding large-scale, ethical documentation projects that create high-quality datasets for low-resource languages. It means supporting developers creating apps and digital tools that communities can use to teach and revitalize their languages, turning speakers into active participants.

The choice is clear. We can either build a monolingual, monolithic AI that reflects a small slice of humanity, or we can harness the full spectrum of human ingenuity to create technology that is as diverse, creative, and equitable as the people it aims to serve. The future of intelligence depends on the languages we save today.

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