FROM the very beginnings of recorded history, there has been a desire to create a single language that could unite humankind. Allegorised in the biblical story of the , as well as in from cultures around the world, the belief has always been that the diversity of languages – there are over 7000 spoken today – is a problem for which we need to find a solution. This has led, down through the centuries, to many a trying to craft some form of truly universal communication.
To date, however, none of these have properly succeeded. But with the recent rapid improvements in artificial intelligence, it looks as if this ambition might finally be within reach.
Advertisement
The solution turns out not to involve the manufacturing of a single universal language – an Esperanto or – but instead the development of frictionless, computer-mediated translation that is embedded within the technologies that have become an integral part of everyday life. Rather than the need for everyone to speak the same language, this approach means that I can speak in my preferred language and you will hear my message, in real time, in yours. The fact we are speaking different languages will simply be irrelevant as far as understanding each other is concerned.
Early versions of this are already in use. For example, for foreign-language postings on Facebook has been around for a few years now, and there are a number of on the market that act as real-life, if somewhat primitive, Babelfish.
The technologies that make this possible – multilingual machine translation, natural language processing and so on – have come along in leaps and bounds over the past few years. The developed by Meta, for instance, can now translate directly from and into any combination of a hundred different languages. They can also work with languages that are spoken rather than written and thus don’t have an archive of texts on which to train the AI model.
Given the momentum in this area, it seems perfectly likely that some form of viable universal communication will be part of everyday life by the end of the decade. But there is a very important question we should be asking about all this: what impact will it have on society and culture as we know it?
The Babel myth, which casts a long shadow over how we think about the topic, is based around the idea that linguistic diversity and multilingualism are flaws in the human faculty for language – that they are a problem, and thus in need of a solution. In reality, they are fundamental features of the system, which give language its flexibility, and upon which whole cultures and identities are built.
It is this inbuilt urge for diversity that is the main reason why all the schemes for universal languages never quite fulfilled their inventors’ ambitions. As communities shift and grow, so do their linguistic habits. And while language is, of course, a means for communicating with others, it is also a means for differentiating yourself from others. So technologies that find ways to bypass or render invisible this diversity will have significant ramifications for human society.
This isn’t to say that a technology that harnesses simultaneous translation to make it possible to communicate effortlessly across linguistic borders won’t be an immensely convenient tool. But as with to the way we communicate, it is likely its impact will be both deep and far-ranging in ways we can’t fully predict. So in the quest to overcome the age-old “confusion of languages”, we need to also look to protect the huge variety that characterises our global linguistic culture.
Philip Seargeant is a linguist at the Open University, UK, and author of
