Endangered Languages in the New Age of AI

Fifteen years ago, while in Mexico City, I stumbled upon the retrospective exhibition Helen Escobedo: A escala humana, a tribute to the artist at the city’s Museum of Modern Art. Escobedo, perhaps Mexico’s most renowned 20th-century sculptor, would leave us prematurely that same year. For several decades, her special aesthetic style—ahead of its time—gave us artworks that challenged universal ideas and social dynamics alike. They were also provocative in raising awareness over our growing ecological crisis. Without exception, on this occasion, the installation at the museum’s central hall greeted viewers with a surprising spectacle: a row of recycled computers neatly placed and organized at the foot of a giant motherboard. Its title was El hoy de hoy (Today’s Today). As an expression of digital capitalism, the colossal image of obsolete infrastructure did not coincide with the ubiquitous technological images that regularly invade our life and imagination as beneficial modern tools. Neither did the sanitized clean perception of the detritus of our digital world speak to the symbolic giant of this representation, a depiction of the excesses of modern consumption materialized into waste.

El hoy de hoy, 2008. Reproduced for the exhibition, Museum of Modern Art. 2010. Photo: Maria A. Woolson

The power of technology represented in Escobedo’s artwork, rather than a universally neutral digital space, was a materially concrete series of voluminous and useless objects. The work physically presented the mostly unseen consequences of the ever-shorter life cycle of digital technology that is rarely transparent and generates enormous amounts of long-term waste.  It alluded to the threads of power that are in control of both tech production—and its unsustainable acceleration—and the production of meaning of this new way of existence. With ​​material waste turned artistic installation, Escobedo exposed how distorted our perception of reality is when it comes to digital technology, a prototypical dynamic of today’s modern world, where the objectification of nature and the planet threatens life itself. The objects also expressed the irrationality of our applied rationality, that is, of how our unsustainable consumer culture is sustained today through a selective rationality inseparable from technology.

Today, Escobedo’s warnings have escalated to levels that no one could have imagined at the time of her retrospective. For example, the 2024 book Nexus, encourages readers to consider the flow of information to which we are regularly exposed in order to ask deeper questions about our humanity and the state of our world, which is on the verge of ecological collapse. The author asks whether humans have the capacity to understand and control the new information networks under unimaginable scenarios, suggesting that silicon chips “can generate spies who never sleep, bankers who never forget, and despots who never die” (Harari p. 32, Nexus: Una breve historia de las redes de información desde la edad de piedra hasta la IA). A more tangible alert published a year ago warns of biases within computer systems, in which processing leads to content with a tendency to conform to dominant Western ideologies. As the use of machine translation (MT) becomes widespread, its authors speculate that content on the internet is being artificially generated through translation and other services, where the biases trained into the initial models may already be contributing to a dangerous homogenization of dominant internet content (Thompson et al. 2024).

Equally provocative is a recent article by Miami University’s Luis Prádanos, who offers an alarming ecosocial vision of the dependency of artificial intelligence (AI) on massive consumption of energy, and reminds us that, as part of a techno-industrial system, AI is ultimately a “product of fossil energy” (Prádanos 2005, p.2). Indeed, the 2025 publication of planetary boundaries—a framework that highlights the rising risks from human pressure on critical global processes—by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Research (PIK) confirms Prádanos’ alert. According to the report, seven boundaries have now been crossed pushing the planet “beyond the limits of a safe operating space, increasing the risk of destabilizing it” (PIK). Included in these boundaries is a recognition of technology within a frame of “novel entities” that refers to technological development and the high volume of “synthetic substances released into the environment without adequate safety testing” (Stockholm University 2025).

These considerations and others that follow illustrate the task of exploring technology and addressing its potential biases when intentionally employing it for uplifting a culturally grounded project. In the next pages, I share the journey that led to my current research project, “A community-based topographical digital archive for preserving Rapa Nui’s endangered language.” Rapanui is the name of the island otherwise known as Easter Island, a Chilean territory in the South Pacific, that is also used to identify their peoples, their language and their culture. What began as a biocultural exploration, when a decade ago I became fascinated with the Rapa Nui’s efforts to revitalize their ancestral language, eventually led to a thorough examination of the means available for the task of building an archive for its preservation. I had to learn how to scrutinize, employ and rely on digital technology. In fact, the development of new computational resources may be the means to maintaining a cultural heritage and linguistic diversity, at a time when many of the world languages are in danger of disappearing (Moseley 2010). Technology can provide increased access to diverse materials, enable long-distance education for diaspora communities and digitally enhance communication in the target language. However, challenges persist as technology is hardly neutral. Warnings against embracing the aura of neutrality that is often attributed to the digital world spans theorists and practitioners alike, across diverse areas of work.

At a more humanistic level, the challenge of digital ubiquity is also having negative social, psychological and cognitive impacts. This observation is of prime importance when one digitizes materials that will eventually be available in schools and distant education, as time spent on a digital device is equivalent to time not being present in one’s environment. A recent study provides causal evidence of the negative impact that a continuous AI interference in everyday life has on mental health, cognitive ability, and emotional well-being (Castelo et al. 2025). In an era when the digital divide between those with resources and those without them is growing, inquiries on accessibility and biases continue to be essential, especially when unpacking challenges for a research project about the conservation of an endangered language in the Global South. Why highlight the Global South? Because the Global South is the geopolitical and abstract space where I locate my research, and it is rich in diverse worldviews that when critically engaged require we question values, ethics and meaning through a decolonial lens.

 Rapa Nui, an Island and a Community

As one of the most isolated places on Earth, Rapa Nui affords an unprecedented opportunity for observing complex systems and adaptive knowledge. Historically, the Rapanui people have been subjected to colonial exclusionary practices—of explorers, slavers, missionaries, corporate interests, the Chilean Navy and Chile’s regulatory and development policies—(Woolson 2016). They have also sustained cultural assimilation into mainstream Chilean society, including the state banning of Rapanui language among school children for over a century (1988-1990). Material appropriation of the territory and its resource base had been the outcome of Chilean State policies (Delsing 2012), and the island’s World Heritage designation fostered a conceptual appropriation of its identity through a global imagination of Rapa Nui as a “museum island” (Fischer p. 199). As a result, their language has become endangered with fewer than 800 native speakers, which also places the community’s traditional and ancestral knowledge at-risk.

Rapanui stories in the oral tradition encode a kind of ecological knowledge that directly responds to their interconnected existence with the natural world. Plants, rocks and ocean life are the territory. The language that names them is the universe through which they become what they are. Language is a means to coding communication, but it is also a metaphor for cultural reality and the essence of collective identities. If threatened semantic domains in traditional and ancestral practices were to vanish, we would see the disappearance of a broad knowledge base in agroecological management, natural healing, water harvesting and sustainable fishing –for once you can no longer name a fish or a natural life cycle, its complex nature ceases to exist in the realm of local knowledge.

In 2012, linguist Steve Pagel concluded a study on Rapa Nui’ linguistic ecology observing that it had experienced enormous changes since the time when colonial actions increased, leading to “the replacement of the indigenous Eastern Polynesian language Rapanui by a Polynesian-European hybrid” (p.87). Spanish was further reinforced as the dominant language on the island, with migration of continental Chileans that followed the 1960s. Today, after years of pursuing cultural and political emancipation from the colonial legacy, a 2016 Indigenous Consultation led Chile to recognize the 1888 annexation treaty or Agreement of Wills and grant the Rapanui community full administration of their cultural heritage—and over 70 percent of the insular territory (Aguilera Hey 2022). Paradoxically, the community’s use of its ancestral language has continued to decline over the last ten years, as Spanish and English are considered languages for professional advancement or necessary to continue studying in continental Chile and abroad. At the same time, acontemporary form of Rapanui language is alive, and the present moment is a historic opportunity, for a large portion of the community is now open to sharing their firm resolve in maintaining their Polynesian identity rooted in the language.

 In response to this opportunity, the project’s goal is to create a community-based, digital, open-access and interoperable language database in the form of a topographic archive of stories and language resources that brings together part of the archipelago of ongoing community efforts towards preserving and revitalizing the Rapa Nui language. Since revitalization requires increasing second-language learners, the archive’s design is intended to both document an endangered human language for its preservation, and didactically organize stories and resources anchored in a pedagogical approach. As a language resource repository, the archive records cultural knowledge surrounding ancestral traditions of living with the ocean (harvesting ocean food sustainably) and living with the land (practicing agro-ecology), which are rooted in Rapanui semantics. However, as mentioned earlier, warnings against embracing the aura of neutrality span from potential biases embedded in computer algorithms, to matters of data sovereignty and erasure or appropriation of cultural content. Indeed, as Enzo Ferrante, an applied artificial intelligence scientist from Argentina, explains “AI systems are designed by people with their own worldviews, prejudices, assessments of facts, and biases acquired throughout their life experiences, which can filter into the design and definition of evaluation criteria for these models” (Ferrante p. 35).

Building the Archive

The framework proposed for the archive’s design is a decolonial outlook, which seeks to identify and resist the legacies of European colonialism which have become integrated in contemporary forms of knowledge (Mignolo). For example, it recognizes that Spanish as the lingua franca has also been the colonial language of the island. And English, although a necessary language for tourism and international trade, is also the language of corporate interests that dispossessed the community of their land and lifestyle between 1895 and 1966. Decolonial thinking therefore extends to how we build knowledge and the languages used to communicate that knowledge. In other words, how languages are employed can reinforce or overcome a colonial legacy. Semiotician Walter Mignolo argues that this legacy, also known as coloniality, has been used to define what knowledge is legitimate, and who, lacking that knowledge, needs to be civilized. A first step in addressing coloniality of knowledge in the project has been the choice of presenting all text first in Rapanui, with an available button that gives the opportunity to read its Spanish equivalent (see image below). When bilingual text is presented simultaneously, the larger font is used for Rapanui, while the smaller font is for Spanish. English is not available on titles or topic description, and is only present upon request from community contributors, for items that pedagogically require the third language. At the same time, all translations have been performed by Rapanui people who either specialize in the teaching the language or are authors of the bilingual material. Machine translation (MT) has been avoided at all times, given the algorithmic design of the two translators available to date and its high incidence of semantic and syntactical biases.  

Example of a page: Micro-stories based on the book Te ‘umu Rapa Nui

Another aspect of the decolonial approach focused on determining the appropriate technologies for constructing the archive, so that it would at all times recognize and guarantee the sovereignty of the Rapa Nui People over their cultural and linguistic heritage. This meant understanding data manipulation during the project as a temporary guardianship to transfer the completed website to the community later. This transfer implied that all technologies used to build the archive follow an open-source model, in which the source codes are made publicly available for anyone to view, use, modify and distribute, therefore enabling community members with some technical fluency to become administrators of the repositories that store the data and code files.

We also emphasized web-design by grounding construction choices on decolonial principles. That entailed identifying and challenging dominant narratives that tend to homogenize information, such as the hierarchical linearity of menus and the structured sequencing of information access. Web design and user interface addressed as much as possible a breakdown of the coloniality inherent to conventional design, and the potential biases embedded in digital algorithms. For example, a design goal was to combine interactive geospatial technology with the database of multimodal linguistic and cultural media to build a robust platform that would be accessed through an image representing the territory. But geography, as a discipline, has a colonial history and maps are a visual language of coloniality. Therefore, the graphical user interface (GUI) first provides the viewer with artwork painted by Rapanui artist Sebastián Pakarati Trengove instead of a geographical map. Pakarati creatively employed Rongorongo characters—the undeciphered writing or proto-writing of Rapanui– to create an image of the island from a bird’s-eye view.

Painting by Sebastián Pakarati Trengove 2023 (reproduced with permission).

The website had to be generationally sensitive—not only for adults, but also for young and future learners of Rapanui—and it needed to be thoughtful of its cultural representation. Therefore, the design had to avoid the default of most content management systems of organizing materials in an expected sequential manner. It also meant resisting commercially driven aesthetics that appeal to a generic consumer. Including a decolonial perspective translates into a more ethical approach to teaching within the context of Latin America. For research that seeks to support the preservation of anendangered language a decolonial approach is necessary and refers to a pedagogical orientation that focuses on expanding the ways of knowing that someone respects, understands and engages. This process is also known as epistemological stretching and involves a series of steps: a. acknowledging the ways of knowing that diverse human groups engage according to their ontologies, b. deconstructing coloniality through research and reflection to prepare interpretative lenses that critically engage those diverse worldviews, c. create a bridge with previously held views to gain new perspectives on relations with other cultural contexts and social groups, including relations between humans and more-than-humans.

The response to this task was to address language, including the interaction between text and image, the role of audio and audiovisual recordings, the spatial disposition of text and the volume of text on a given screen, among others. This focus on the linguistic element of culture is well-supported by studies that show how language shapes the way we think and perceive the world (Borodistsky 2023). In fact, language plays a fundamental role in the construction of social life, as social groups recognize themselves through language and it is by means of language that our reality becomes a shared collective experience with which we understand the world. In Rapanui culture, stories embed a meaning that for several generations has been the outcome of co-evolution of biological and cultural processes. These stories were passed down orally through generations of Rapa Nui and recorded during the 20th century in a variety of forms by diverse interlocutors, many of them foreigners. Therefore, employing a decolonial frame when assessing how different ways of appropriating knowledge give rise to new learning environments ensures the recognition of multiple perspectives and narrative forms that underscore the collective Rapa Nui identity.

Looking Ahead

I’ve critiqued certain aspects of AI using a range of recent publications to address challenges in building an archive for an endangered language. While the scrutiny of these challenges is essential for technological developers, my critical observations are not meant to discourage discrete use of digital technology. Rather, I want to raise awareness about the inherent problems of indiscriminate use. For the project, the outcome has been the production of a website that has been shaped into an archival map for viewers of multiple ages. Its content includes high-quality textual and audio-visual material presented bilingually—Rapanui, Spanish—with a focus on stories and oral traditions. Technical decisions were also made to guarantee continuity of data access over time, and total data sovereignty by the Rapa Nui community, using technology that prevents cloud services or third-party providers from interacting with it.

As a community collaboration, critical observations were shared and discussed before they were integrated into design decisions, such as the choice of user interface—the visual and functional components users see, hear and click-on to operate the website’s system. The result has been a user interphase composed primarily by images, each corresponding to a particular area of content, organized circularly or into particular visual patterns, to avoid hierarchical sequences—of left-right, or up-down— and engage viewers first through their visual language and then with text. Employing images as a first point of access can easily engage the memory of young viewers, while defy the conventional expectations of older viewers that most likely have prior digital experiences with sequential and linear organization of elements like menus, buttons and screens.

While risks still exist, especially for communities of underrepresented languages in light of the accelerated technological advancement from large companies and corporate providers, the critical observations I’ve discussed here may be small steps in resisting homogenizing risks.