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.

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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.

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