The Role of Language Technology in Promoting the Social, Political and Economic Participation of Minority Language Speakers and Members of Linguistic Minorities

Abstract

With the incremental development of language technologies, language barriers are being dismantled in more and more areas, enabling minorities to participate in social, economic and political life. With the help of machine translation, automatic interpretation and chat bots developed for different uses, etc., minority language users can now access various services enter into contracts or access information on public affairs in their own language. While these developments must be welcomed, such technologies are typically and inherently ’biased’ in the sense that they are developed primarily for the majority, official, or state languages. Nevertheless, several official languages and even state languages may find themselves in a bind, where language technology development does not reach them due to the low number of their speakers. As a result, new dividing lines may open up between the differentlanguages, and existing minority statuses may be cemented. In addition, linguistic minorities such as the deaf, blind, dumb, hard of hearing, etc. may also benefit from access to and communication through language technology, such as automatic captioning, screen readers or sign-language gloves. At the same time, it exactly is in these areas that progress is slow, which may lead to the long-term exclusion of linguistic minorities from modern communication solutions. the relationship between individual languages and their speakers, with some language communities lagging behind others in language technology developments. Thus, language technology developments not only provide opportunities for users’ social, economic and political participation but may also reshape the relationship between languages and their speakers, forcing some language communities to lag behind in terms of language technology developments.