Author: paige laevy

In 2016, something truly bizarre occurred within Google’s translation system, and the majority of people still don’t fully understand what it meant. The company’s Neural Machine Translation system began subtly translating between Japanese and Korean on its own after being trained to translate between particular language pairs, such as English to Japanese and English to Korean. No one instructed it to. It was not provided with Japanese-Korean training data. It just figured it out, and in the process, it seemed to create what researchers cautiously referred to as a “interlingua”—a sort of artificial, internal language that is unreadable by humans.…

The finger paintings and tiny chairs are not the first things you notice when you walk into some nursery classrooms in Hoboken, New Jersey, or the west side of Los Angeles. It’s the noise. A Mandarin counting song sung by a teacher. When her mother shows up for pickup, the toddler answers a question about snack time in French before switching to English. Children who still require assistance zipping their coats speak with such ease that the air is filled with syllables that most American adults have never learned. Although bilingual nursery programs have been expanding nationwide for more than…

The fact that the most well-known voices in artificial intelligence—Siri, Alexa, and Cortana—arrived in the world devoid of faces, ancestry, and a clear connection to the communities most impacted by the technology they represent is subtly unsettling. They are smooth, pleasant, and purposefully non-racial. Then C.L.Ai.R.A., a bilingual Afro-Latina AI, appeared. She has kind eyes, a soft afro, and what her creators call the “sharpest brain in the A.I. world.” She made her debut in September 2021 and began to appear in classrooms almost right away. She may still be unknown to the majority of mainstream tech professionals. In collaboration…

A graduate student named Ivory Yang is teaching a machine to read a script that was previously passed between women on silk fans and handkerchiefs in a Dartmouth research lab. The writing system, known as Nüshu, was developed four centuries ago by Yao women in Hunan Province, China, who used it for covert communication. When Yang was younger, her grandmother taught her a few words. She is now trying to teach a large language model something no AI has ever known by feeding it those words along with just 35 pairs of matched sentences. It was successful. In a way.…

On any given Friday, the staff at a small cocktail bar off Dean Street will switch between Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and English without giving it any thought. Customers hardly ever notice. They’re too preoccupied to choose between a mezcal sour and a dirty martini. However, if you stay at the bar long enough and pay attention, you begin to hear something amazing—a kind of rolling multilingual performance that never makes an announcement, never requests attention, and never receives any. In theory, London has always been a multilingual city. More than three hundred languages are spoken throughout the capital, according to…

There’s a part of Pancho’s story that sticks in your memory more than the technical details, and it’s only known by that name in published research. His first decoded sentence, generated by electrodes placed against his brain and deciphered by a University of California, San Francisco artificial intelligence system, was straightforward: “My family is outside.” It was delivered in English. However, Pancho is a native Spanish speaker who spent his childhood dreaming, arguing, and laughing in Spanish before suffering a devastating stroke at the age of twenty that left him paralyzed and speechless. He learned English later, after the harm…

The nation changed from being arguably the most linguistically homogeneous it had ever been—just 4.7% of its population was foreign-born, with immigrant tongues becoming extinct—to something that resembles its original state much more. You can learn more from the soundscape of a grocery store in Houston or a suburban Virginia school hallway than from a policy paper. Of course, English is used everywhere. However, Spanish, Mandarin, Tagalog, Arabic, and Vietnamese are also. Long regarded as the national standard, the monolingual American may be nearing an expiration date. For decades, the numbers have been steadily increasing, but they are often overshadowed…

Waking up from a dream in which you were speaking a language you hardly know can be unsettling. Speaking it fluently, confidently, and with the ease that never quite materializes during waking hours, rather than stumbling through it like you might at a café in Barcelona. It occurs more frequently than most people realize, and scientists are just now starting to figure out what it means. For the majority of human history, or as long as people have spoken multiple languages, bilingual dreaming has been a phenomenon. However, serious research on it is still in its infancy. The mechanics of…

You’ll hear something most Londoners don’t notice if you walk into a nursery school in Tower Hamlets on any given morning. Youngsters as young as four years old alternate between English and Sylheti in the middle of sentences and occasionally words, making sounds that aren’t entirely consistent with either language. Confusion is not the issue. After paying close attention, researchers at Oxford and Lancaster University have discovered that these kids are engaging in far more fascinating activities than simply switching tongues. They seem to be constructing a new one. There are about 652,000 Bangladeshis living in England, mostly in the…

The majority of people never witness a certain type of Saturday morning in London. Around nine o’clock, a parent volunteer is tapping a hand-drawn Polish flag to a whiteboard, stacking workbooks on folding tables, and dragging plastic chairs across linoleum in an Ealing church hall or a Hammersmith community center. Kids show up with lunchboxes in their hands and winter coats, not totally excited. They’re at football practice with their friends. They’re still in bed with their siblings. However, here they are, learning how to conjugate verbs in a language that occasionally feels more like a second skin they’re still…