How Multilingual AI Can Protect Language and Improve Global Technology

Ram Mohan is Chairman and Founder of the Coalition on Digital Impact (CODI), an independent, global coalition founded to empower global communities to access and navigate the Internet in their native languages.

The modern ability to digitize medical records, financial transactions, and cultural documents means that important items can be recorded for posterity. But when it comes to language, technology’s rapid advancement could lead to the extinction of global languages.

For example, in southwestern Ethiopia, the Ongota language has virtually no digital presence, lacking a standardized script, keyboard support, app localization, digitized content, or representation in AI language models. Ongota speakers—and their knowledge systems—are effectively invisible in the digital world, and the language will likely die with the handful of elderly people who still speak it.

Current estimates predict that over half of the world’s languages will become extinct within 75 years, with some estimates suggesting that one language dies every two weeks. AI has created new possibilities for communication, with instant translation services and voice assistants. But while AI has the potential to bridge linguistic divides, it also poses a threat to the very languages it seeks to translate and understand.

As governments and private companies race to develop AI, large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT are being trained with a handful of dominant, data-rich languages, such as English, Spanish, and Mandarin. Ignoring countless languages and the communities they represent has created an AI landscape that is heavily skewed toward the Western world. As AI becomes more integrated into sectors like education, healthcare, and governance, the prevalence of a handful of languages in these systems risks leading to linguistic homogenization.

Harnessing AI to Tackle Today’s Challenges

The digital access movement encompasses all efforts to address economic, cultural, and technical disparities that limit access to the internet and the opportunities it creates. But language has been overlooked, despite being a key factor in forming meaningful connections online.

Language preservation must move beyond oral traditions and become part of the digital age. We must work to design AI systems that embrace linguistic diversity and integrate multilingualism into the internet infrastructure to avoid erasure and improve our digital world. AI systems can be part of the solution, helping to document and revive endangered languages through text, speech recognition, and translation tools. So, how can we build a world where everyone can navigate the internet in their own language?

Internet pioneer Vint Cerf says, “Meaningful spoken and written linguistic access is necessary to realize the Internet's full potential. Absent effective action, many communities around the world will be wrongly excluded. This cannot be an acceptable outcome."

The newly launched Coalition on Digital Impact (CODI), an independent, global alliance of internet leaders and like-minded organizations, is rising to meet this challenge. Through education, advocacy, and awareness efforts, CODI and its members are working to reduce barriers to internet access, build a more secure infrastructure for the future of the web, and advance policies that promote equitable access to the digital world.

Speakers of minority languages are largely unable to reap the benefits of AI. A child in a remote village may struggle to find educational content in their native tongue or may face challenges in using voice-activated devices or translation services. Without digital tools, the practical advantages of maintaining a language diminish, hastening its extinction.

Universal Acceptance: A Small Change With Outsized Benefits

For AI to be a force for good in the digital age, we need to foster a culture of multilingualism and 'Universal Acceptance' online. One solution is for organizations to implement Universal Acceptance (UA) protocols, the principle that all valid domain names, email addresses, and internet protocols should be accepted and recognized by all internet systems, regardless of language, script, or other characteristics. Non-Latin scripts such as Arabic, Chinese, and Cyrillic are increasingly being used for domain names, and UA ensures that systems can handle these characters and scripts. UA-compliance can be achieved through simple code edits or features like voice-to-text or live captions ― small changes with far-reaching benefits.

Designing products and services for a wide range of users, without the need for adaptations or specialized features, is essential for global market participation. A 2017 study found that the Universal Acceptance of internet domain names could be a USD $9.8 billion+ opportunity. UA represents the future of the web ― one that is backed by a more democratic, secure infrastructure ― and an enormous economic opportunity. But this future will depend on global collaboration and investment.

A truly multilingual internet requires addressing language barriers, literacy challenges, cultural sensitivities, and social stigmas that impede technology adoption. AI will play a decisive role in the future of global languages – it will either preserve them or accelerate their extinction. By developing AI systems that reflect linguistic diversity and building multilingualism and Universal Acceptance into internet systems, we can create a digital world where every linguistic group has a place. The time to act is now.