Defining language and managing its use: Language technology as language management

Abstract

Language technologies such as voice user interfaces, large language models and machine translation tools are embedded in an ever-growing range of digital devices and services used by millions of people every day in contexts as diverse as schools, homes, hospitals, and offices. In this paper, I argue that the way these technologies are used by and used on language workers and other members of language communities can be understood as a type of language management . As social scientists of technology have long pointed out, all technologies are shaped by and expressive of ideologies. In the case of language technologies, some of these are ideologies about language(s) and their speakers. Rather than simply (or only) functioning as linguistic interfaces facilitating interaction between people, language technologies reinforce linguistic ideologies, and contribute to the ideological construction of particular languages and their communities, as well as more abstract notions of ‘language’ and its value and purpose. They are furthermore often directly deployed to manage language work(ers) through surveillance, and partial automation. Understanding the ways in which language technologies reproduce, mediate and shape linguistic behaviours and beliefs as part of “algorithmic language management” allows us to connect them to both the broader sociotechnical and political project of artificial intelligence, and the scholarship on language policy. • Language technologies are used to both manage language workers (e.g., assessing performance, tracking behaviour), and more specifically manage language by affording particular kinds of practices and beliefs (to specific types of actors, using specific mechanisms). • I argue that language technologies are not just downstream of language management, but are perhaps more usefully understood as language management. I draw this distinction because I think it is analytically useful to analyse language technologies as the materialisation of broader ideologies. • Language technologies reflect and reproduce the political, social, cultural and economic conditions, and, indeed, language policies they are developed within. What kinds of uses they afford, to whom they afford these uses, and in what ways they afford them fundamentally depends on the ambient language behaviours and beliefs. • Language technologies designed to facilitate management of linguistic and affective practices reproduce wider language ideologies (e.g., standard language ideology), and enable (and encourage) their users (businesses or managers) to enforce "custom'' language ideologies (e.g., particular scripts or tone). The physical and discursive construction (or, design and marketing) of commercial language technologies transmits language ideologies and, furthermore, constrains language practices.

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