No language left behind? : Towards an integrated framework for linguistic rights, human rights and technology regulation

Tools

Birnie, Ingeborg (2026) No language left behind? : Towards an integrated framework for linguistic rights, human rights and technology regulation. Language and Law / Languagem e Direito, 12 (1). (https://doi.org/10.21747/21833745/lanlaw12_1a1)

[thumbnail of Birnie-2026-No-language-left-behind]
Preview
 Text. Filename: Birnie-2026-No-language-left-behind.pdf
Final Published Version
License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 logo
Download (321kB)| Preview

Abstract

Recent technological advances have resulted in a rapid increase in the use of generative artificial intelligence (AI). These tools and applications create new content using statistical models trained by (online) databases (Aydın & Karaarslan, 2023). This content is increasingly difficult to distinguish from that created by humans:  blurring the lines between the digital and real worlds (Ferrara, 2024). These developments have been recognised as creating opportunities to improve human rights, ‘including access to information, health, education, and public services’ whilst, at the same time, there have been significant concerns raised that AI has the potential to also ‘dramatically intensify online harms’ (United Nations, 2023). This has resulted in the United Nations AI Advisory Body (2023) calling for AI to be used for the benefit of all.             Initiatives to regulate AI at supra-national level, for example, the EU AI Act, have focussed on the risk they pose to either individual or State values (Fink, 2021), or focussed on governance (United Nations AI Advisory Body, 2023) but have not explicitly considered the way these impact on individuals use technology to communicate, with each other, the world around them, and also with the tools and technologies, in particular how these impact on linguistic and cultural diversity These regulatory or advisory frameworks have, both implicitly and explicitly, acknowledged that access and provision to AI technologies is not universal, and that the largest growth has been in a high- or middle-income economy countries and among populations with a high level of English-proficiency (Liu & Wang, 2024). This is, perhaps, not surprising: current digital tools and online spaces are significantly biased towards users of English – with this being the main language used on 63% of all websites and a further 9 languages making up 75% of the internet (The Centre for Internet and Society et al., 2022).  This dominance of a small number of big languages in online spaces, with significant bias towards large and mostly Western-European, languages (Toupin et al., 2021), is contributing to wider notions of digital imperialism and colonisation (Jin, 2013) as individuals are only being able to access or use these tools and technologies in a language that is supported(Pimienta, 2022). The digitally under-represented languages are often already considered ‘endangered’ or at risk of disappearing as a community language, but digital imperialism also affects small(er) state languages which, measured by conventional language vitality criteria, are currently considered to be ‘safe’ (Rehm & Uszkoreit, 2013). This article will introduce a new framework for the assessment of digital language vitality in the AI era, which will be used to identify high-level policy recommendations to support users of languages that are currently digitally disadvantaged in ensuring equity of access which is culturally and linguistically appropriate, situated within human rights legislation and in particular the frameworks to protect minorities within the European context.

ORCID iDs

Birnie, Ingeborg ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8227-9364;
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)