Author: paige laevy

On a Tuesday morning, you’ll hear it before you see it if you stroll down Great Eastern Street. In the middle of a phone call, a product manager switches from English to fast-paced, clipped German. Outside a café, two engineers are arguing about flat whites in Spanish. At one of those long communal tables that every coworking space in Shoreditch seems to insist on, a recruiter is working through a French CV while wearing a headset. The glass-fronted offices surrounding the Old Street roundabout remain largely unchanged from five years ago, and the neighborhood continues to refer to itself as…

A five-year-old boy named Arman sits across from a speech pathologist in a tiny therapy room outside of Chicago. He speaks three languages: English in preschool, Urdu at home, and a little Punjabi with his grandmother. He mimics noises. He pauses in the middle of his sentence. He clearly looks for the correct word and switches to another language when he can’t find it in the first. His mom is concerned. The clinician notes “stuttering.” For years, the label remains in place. Arman’s story is not uncommon. In cities where bilingual households are now commonplace rather than uncommon, they are…

Last winter, a software engineer typed a sentence into a chatbot in a small Lahore office that was half in Urdu and half in English. The response was in the same hybrid register and even included a phrase that his grandmother had used. He chuckled, then stopped. Observing such moments gives one the impression that something has changed without anyone noticing. English has been the focal point for the majority of the brief history of large language models. That was the tendency of the training data. That was how the benchmarks leaned. The majority of the investors were Americans, and…

When actors begin practicing the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet, a certain silence descends upon the rehearsal space. Everyone believes they are familiar with the lines. This version, however, is distinct. The friction of two languages attempting to meet halfway is something the play has seldom carried before, as one actor speaks in Welsh and the other in English. The point is that friction. Shakespeare’s Globe and Theatr Cymru have collaborated to create a whole production around it. Romeo and Juliet, directed by Steffan Donnelly, who was just appointed an Associate Artist at the Globe, divides the conflict along…

A Ukrainian woman in her forties sits across from a therapist who, until two years ago, had a fairly typical caseload in a small clinic on the outskirts of Warsaw. Her waiting room is now crowded with people who express their sorrow in a language that most Polish doctors are unable to understand. In halting English, the woman first attempts to explain what transpired in her village. Then she comes to a halt. She switches to Ukrainian. Her shoulders start to loosen. The therapist, who happens to be bilingual due to a family history, nods and allows her to go…

About twenty people are conjugating verbs on a Tuesday night in Crown Heights in the back room of a bar that primarily serves natural wine to patrons wearing pricey cardigans. Ikh hob, du host, er hot is written on the whiteboard. The instructor, a woman in her late twenties who has a stick-and-poke tattoo of a Yiddish letter on her forearm, is patient in the way that someone becomes after fifty explanations of the same grammar concept and still finds it fascinating. There isn’t a single person in the room who resembles the stock photo of a Yiddish speaker. Fur…

I was watching a friend play a 30-second video on his phone at a café in Lahore when I first heard a cloned voice that tricked me. It was purportedly his uncle requesting money. However, his uncle had spent the entire time asleep at home. The voice was correct. The breathing was correct. His uncle was correct even when he inserted a small Punjabi word between English sentences. Later on, my friend laughed about it, but it was a nervous laugh, the kind that people have when something has changed beneath them. I’m concerned about that shift. In the past,…

A man by the name of Pancho lived in a sort of locked room for almost twenty years. At the age of 20, he suffered a stroke in the early 2000s that nearly completely destroyed his ability to move, speak, and carry on a normal conversation. He was able to groan. He was able to grunt. However, the words remained stuck behind his eyes, only audible to him. Inside a lab at the University of California, San Francisco, that gradually and intermittently changed. Then, in May of last year, it was altered once more, this time in two languages. A…

A three-year-old named Bart wanders out of his bedroom on a damp Tuesday afternoon in north London with his hair sticking up in five different directions. He asks for a biscuit and, somewhere between the kitchen counter and the radiator, decides that he would prefer to count in Spanish. His parents hardly blink. They’re accustomed to it by now. Italian shows up for breakfast. Dutch arrives during bath time. The gaps are filled by English. Maurice, the family’s border terrier, receives instructions in the language that is most convenient for him. A British childhood increasingly resembles this. Of course, not…

A civil servant is squinting at a forty-page policy document somewhere in a municipal office this morning in an attempt to summarize it for a citizen who came in perplexed by a benefits form. She’s short on time. She most likely lacks the necessary training as well. Quietly, an AI tool could complete the majority of that task in less than a minute in a tab she hasn’t yet opened. Is there anyone who has taught her how to use it without getting burned? That little, everyday scene serves as the actual setting for a much larger narrative. Less than…