Language is the missing link in the AI revolution

Originally published in Manila Bulletin

These were the thoughts running through my mind on the train to London AI Week where I am slated to speak about a future where AI truly serves humanity. Around me, people spoke in German, Polish, Tamil, and English. The mix of languages reminded me that while the world grows more connected, the digital world remains linguistically lopsided. If you asked your phone in Polish for a definition of multimodal AI, you might get a passable response. Ask in Tamil, and it may struggle. Ask in Quechua or Wolof or Karay-A, and you’ll likely get silence.

This isn’t just a technical quirk—it’s a quiet crisis. We’ve made tremendous progress expanding internet access, improving device affordability, and building digital skills across the globe. But one enormous gap remains: most of the world cannot speak to AI—and cannot be heard by it—in their own language.

There are 7,159 living languages spoken today. As of 2023, fewer than one percent of them are fully supported by AI systems. Only 32 languages were classified as “digitally thriving” in Ethnologue’s Global Digital Language Support Scale. Just 108 more were deemed “vital.” That leaves over 7,000 languages with limited or no access to speech recognition, machine translation, text-to-speech tools, or even reliable typing interfaces.

This means that while AI is marketed as a universal tool, it is still speaking mostly to the privileged linguistic elite. The majority of humanity remains on mute.

The consequences are more serious than many realize. In a world increasingly driven by digital interaction, language is the gatekeeper. If your language isn’t recognized by the technology, then you are, in effect, locked out. Public health campaigns fail when vital information isn’t communicated in the local language. Disaster alerts lose their power when they’re issued in a tongue the local population doesn’t read fluently. Educational platforms and e-governance tools are out of reach when the interface speaks in unfamiliar words. Economic opportunity is stunted when you can’t sell, search, or serve in the language your customers actually use.

And then there’s the cultural cost. Languages are not just tools of communication—they carry stories, songs, rituals, and knowledge systems. When a language lacks a digital footprint, it becomes invisible to the algorithms and models shaping our shared reality. And invisibility, especially in the AI age, is a fast track to extinction.

Today, over 3,200 languages are considered “still”—barely surviving, with limited usage and almost no digital representation. Another 3,200 are “emerging,” spoken by nearly a billion people but similarly unsupported. These languages teeter on the edge. Their speakers may remain vibrant communities, but without digital relevance, their future is fragile. An entire generation could grow up unable to text, code, search, or even type in their own language.

This should not be inevitable. We already have open-source platforms that allow communities to collect their own voice data. We have multilingual AI models capable of learning from smaller datasets. And we have a growing global awareness of the need for more inclusive AI. But awareness alone is not action, and market-driven development alone will not solve this problem.

What we need is a shift in mindset—from seeing language support as a technical feature, to recognizing it as a matter of digital justice. AI companies must treat linguistic inclusion not as an afterthought, but as a core responsibility. Governments must include language coverage in their national digital strategies. Philanthropic funders should prioritize digital language equity with the same urgency they give to literacy, education, or internet access.

Because if AI is to truly serve humanity, it must reflect humanity—not just in data points, but in words, voices, and tongues.

As I stepped off the train and into London AI Week, I realized that the future of AI isn’t just about what it can do. It’s about who it will speak to—and who it will listen to. Right now, far too many people are being left out of the conversation.

It’s time we changed that.

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