Decolonizing Language Resources in the Human-Machine Era: A Critical Reflection on Universalist Ideologies and Language Technologies

This 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.