AI’s Potential for Preserving Dying Languages

GenAI’s primary value-add – for now – is its ability to generate content, whether that’s text, audio, images, or code. In a world where nearly everything is online, it’s easy to conclude that this will have widespread impacts.

GenAI is the ultimate polyglot. Given enough time and enough data, it can learn a language to an incredible degree of fluency and grammatical ability. This capability makes it the perfect tool to bring dying languages back from the brink. Given a large enough data set, an LLM is able to pick up any language on its own. This would be a game changer for many small languages with just a handful of speakers. It would allow them to strengthen their community and to preserve their languages for eternity no matter what may happen to them.

Linguistic communities can face a different problem. Rather than not having enough speakers, it can be that they’re spread around the world, and don’t have the opportunity to practice their languages. These heritage speakers and their children will also benefit from GenAI tools. As a child, I was able to practice Hungarian quite often, as I grew up in a community alongside other kids and families speaking the same language. This was essential to ensuring I grew up knowing how to speak the language. However, some heritage speakers aren’t in environments where that’s possible. If you are a Tongan immigrant to Belgium, it’s not likely there will be many other Tongans around. This way, GenAI can perhaps simulate other language styles for kids learning the language, or provide a way for individual immigrants to practice the language if they have no other way.

For those heritage speakers who might have grown up speaking and have since forgotten their language, GenAI is an easy way to re-immerse. It isn’t necessary to go and find a language practice group or return to the motherland. GenAI cannot be a substitute for the human element in all this, but it sure can help.

GenAI will not be able to replace real community. To a child growing up in a language community, mixing with a lot of people shows off the different styles of speaking, and introduces new jargon, slang, and dialects. A GenAI model can do that, but the two are not the same. In this case as in all, GenAI is a tool to enhance what already exists and to make our lives easier, but it cannot be a replacement.

Beyond just preserving dying languages, GenAI can help make existing ones more resilient, preventing them from becoming endangered in the first place. At the same time, it can help languages grow.

If you want to learn Thai, it might be difficult to find a Thai language class. Yes, it’s possible to take online courses, but once you get over the first steps, it’s much more rewarding and satisfying to speak with someone. You get instant feedback, and are able to notice patterns you might not otherwise notice. For now, GenAI is primarily a text-based tool. However, with ChatGPT 4o, it’s gaining the ability to hold conversation. This will be incredibly valuable for language-learning. Languages with different alphabets are much more difficult to practice…

Now, this can’t all just spring up out of nowhere. For GenAI to be a useful tool in preserving or teaching any given language, a lot of work needs to be done. First off, a language needs to have enough written content to train an LLM. This is difficult for many languages that only have a handful of speakers. However, with the prospect of a model that can preserve their languages for eternity, linguistic communities might be motivated to provide such content. At the same time, it might eventually be possible for such an LLM to be created based on audio data. If enough conversations in such languages are recorded, it could be possible to construct a model that can speak – and maybe even write – it.

If GenAI is used for this purpose, its understanding can be used not just to preserve communities, but to advance linguistics. If it develops a strong understanding of obscure languages, it may be able to articulate their structures, rules, and patterns in ways that make them not only easy to study academically, but easier to learn. One wouldn’t need to find a native speaker to teach them - ChatGPT could. This would allow anyone with an interest to learn about obscure cultures, and linguists to have access to much more diverse content to study. Now, I’m not sure how useful this would really be. But it sure could be interesting! And that’s what makes GenAI fantastic. It opens up an incredible amount of doors for what we can accomplish, and broadens our horizons. Let’s use it - in language and elsewhere.