Reading journalist and author Sophia Smith Galer’s (@sophiasgaler) invaluable article “What happens when we lose a language?” via The Guardian, where she points out that 44% of the world’s 7000+ known languages are now considered endangered, with less than 1000 speakers left. She also mentions that 88% of the world’s population is a native speaker of one of only 20 languages.
The author mentions the “one-nation-one-language narratives”, which, in my view, are often results of deliberate yet necessary political decisions. Each government has to choose a specific language or two to unite its citizens. Yet, even when multiculturalism policies ensure and even encourage diverse communities to celebrate their own unique languages and cultures, many migrants still feel stigmatised — and can be openly chastised — for using their mother tongue in mainstream society.
Indeed, while discussing her book How to Kill a Language: Power, Resistance and the Race to Save Our Words (2026) in an interview, the author argues “who gets to decide whether a language is valuable or worthy” is not just an important and complex issue but also one that demands our urgent attention. “The targeting and misinformation around foreign languages is a dog whistle. It’s a dog whistle for saying that not only do you speak a foreign language, you come from a certain place and look a certain way.”
But what’s really alarming, in the author’s view, is how technological innovations actually “exacerbate existing inequalities” between languages and cultures. Particularly in this age of AI, if one feeds garbage into AI — data that is “not complete, not wholesome, not timely, stale, not reliable, or not accurate” — then the data that AI uses to produce and/or influence decisions will also be garbage. In the author’s words: “My biggest worry is that there are big tech platforms trying to create resources in endangered languages and they are not involving linguists and speakers, and are producing inaccurate tools.”
The GIGO problem is explained so well in Joe McKendrick’s (X: @joemckendrick) article “Garbage In, Garbage Out? Trust In The Data Behind AI Is Vanishing” via Forbes (@forbes). “While 63% of leaders say finding, analyzing, and interpreting data on their own is key to their jobs, 54% of them aren’t fully confident in their ability to do this.” This article is absolutely worth reading.
Voices under the Sun 陽光下的聲音 