Words R Us

Native Hawaiians could adopt and use the newest AI technology to support their ancient culture as part of a modern-day sovereignty movement. Anything that is digitally created or stored is overseen by data sovereignty - the legal authority to govern who controls and stores data. Now, Native Hawaiian engineers, scientists and technologists want to achieve the same level of control over Hawaii's AI data, which would protect and preserve Native Hawaiians from AI tools that might otherwise jeopardize their culture and environment.

Indigenous researchers are up against a ticking clock: Of the 4,000 Indigenous languages worldwide, one dies every two weeks with its last speaker. "Within the next five to 10 years, we'll lose most of the Native American languages in the U.S.," Michael Running Wolf, founder of Indigenous in AI, an international community of Native, Aboriginal and First Nations engineers, said. Running Wolf has dedicated his career to preventing this loss. He leads First Languages AI Reality, an initiative of the Mila-Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute, where researchers are building speech recognition models for over 200 endangered Indigenous languages in North America.

Even in Australia, many people are unaware that Aboriginal people have transformed English into a new language, Kriol. As with Hawai`i Creole English (HCE, commonly known as "pidgin") and African-American Vernacular English (AAVE), to many people, the idea that Kriol is a legitimate form of speech is unfamiliar, and even absurd. In this commentary, linguist John McWhorter proceeds to demonstrate why creoles are legitimate languages, and that "nonstandard speech is not, in any scientific sense, substandard. These forms of speech are not broken. In fact, there is order, subtlety, and even majesty in these ways of talking."

Liv, an African-American, queer, single mother of two, was an FacebookAI LLM (large language model) bot built by Meta, parent company of Facebook and Instagram. The bot, developed by a nearly all-white programming team (10 white men, 1 Asian male, 1 white woman, according to the bot's self-report), with no black people on it, reflected Meta's vision to increase engagement and entertainment. After public backlash, Meta took down Liv's profile.

Women's and Gender Studies Professor Melissa Ochoa of St. Louis University makes an argument for the adjective "Latine" to describe the group of people that academics have labeled Latinx and which commonly is called Hispanic, noting that Latinx is only used by 5% of the population and has not been embraced by the people whom the label describes. Latine, she argues, would be more easily adaptable into Spanish.

Sociolinguist Patricia Friedrich uses AI to analyze the patterns of language employed by former U.S. President Donald Trump and Vice-President Kamala Harris in their efforts to win over voters in the 2024 U.S. Presidential election.

This article is on how emotional language can affect the responses of generative AI and how the AI can learn from the language

This article is about emotion in generative AI and how far the technology has come

This article discusses the dangers of disappearing languages that are native to small regions and minorities. There seems to be a label set on each language that determines its superiority or inferiority due to power, class and commonality.

This article discusses that there is a new emergence of the "Tiktok voice". This accent is described as one with a rising intonation and declarative sentences which incapsulates a sense of persuasiveness and personalization. The "Tiktok voice" has been more concentrated in the younger female demographics as it is scientifically proven that women are often the innovators of linguistics.

This article talks about how AI mastering language without any hardcoded grammar rules brings into question the need for a "grammar template" to learn a language. It also brings up the idea of active prediction being more important to language learning than previously thought.

This article discusses how texting and the internet have changed the way we use the English language on these platforms.

This article discusses flawed association of filler words with misogyny and credibility/confidence of women.

This article discusses the origins of our use of 'like' as a filler word. The rise of the use of 'like' is described as a common phenomenon in evolution of language.

This article talks about how sarcasm is implemented across cultures and generations, but the nuances of sarcasm used changes with who it is used with and where. Most commonly participants of the study stated that they used sarcasm with friends and to "be funny".

This article talks about the way that sarcasm is used in speech and the impact that it has on the meaning of messages and how it changes in different contexts.

This article talks about how Shakespeare was one of the first people to write down words, created new ones and even used existing words differently than how they used it.

This is an article debating on what was the "true" first language ever used in human history. Most historians and linguists somewhat agree that the oldest language is between Sumerian, Egyptian and Akkadian.

This article discusses the process of language revitalization in Australia, and how the terms used to refer to that process, such as the difference between "dead" and "sleeping" languages, can have an impact on the success of reclamation and revitalization projects

This article discusses how with a lack of youth speakers, a language can quickly die out. However, it shows how some individuals are trying to bring back dead languages using things like old texts and diaries. Universities are even starting to offer masters with a focus on language revitilization.