Author: paige laevy

When I first heard Wampanoag spoken out loud, it was by a young child. Standing in a community center north of Cape Cod, the seven-year-old was making fun of her younger brother over something involving a sandwich. For more than a century, there were no living speakers of the language. A young girl was now using it to irritate her sibling. That has a quality that is both almost comical and simultaneously catches your throat. Linguists used an odd term for languages similar to hers for a very long time. They referred to them as “sleeping.” The difference is more…

On a Tuesday morning, the cafeteria of a public elementary school in Albuquerque smells like floor wax and green chile. A young boy is reading a tattered paperback in Spanish to a young girl, who primarily responds in English. This doesn’t seem out of the ordinary to either of them. Neither does their teacher, who is holding a coffee and leaning against a folding table. This scene might have been a curiosity ten years ago. It’s a line item today. From the high desert districts of New Mexico to the brownstone-lined neighborhoods of Albany, New York, public schools in the…

Singapore feels less like a nation and more like a functional prototype when you stroll through its financial district on a muggy weekday morning. Towers of glass reflect one another. E-bike couriers maneuver through traffic. A mid-sized company is most likely completing its application for cloud credits worth several hundred thousand Singapore dollars somewhere inside a building close to Raffles Place. This is the essence of what local officials have begun to refer to as the “AI bilingual” approach—fluent in deployment, fluent in policy, and making a concerted effort to avoid having to choose between the two. Observing this from…

I thought a partner at a mid-sized firm was kidding when he first told me that his junior associates had stopped reading contracts. He wasn’t. He expressed it in a somewhat melancholy and largely dejected manner, similar to how someone might say that their children no longer write in cursive. Of course, the contracts are still read. Simply put, not by people anymore—at least not during the initial pass. A 26-year-old who is expected to know what to do with them receives the results after a model reads them, highlights any odd clauses, and translates the foreign-language passages into something…

Last spring, I passed a small office in Queens with a sign in the window that said “AI-assisted home search” in smaller print beneath three languages: Mandarin, Spanish, and English. That sign would have said something different a year ago. Perhaps it would have stated “translators available.” Perhaps nothing at all. The shift is silent, but if you know where to look, you can find it everywhere. For many years, the American real estate market has operated under the strange premise that the buyer eventually learns to communicate in English, even if they don’t think, dream, or argue with their…

Between the third software update and the fourth language rollout in the spring of last year, it became clear that bilingual AI was no longer a topic for research papers. People had stopped using it. without considering. without first translating in their minds. This month’s announcement from Spotify about four new DJ personas who speak French, German, Italian, and Brazilian Portuguese seems like the kind of news that appears subtly but has a deeper meaning. The company expanded the feature into over 75 markets by adding Maïa, Ben, Alex, and Dani to its AI music-curation team. Five years ago, you…

People who are bilingual do one small thing without realizing it. They begin a sentence in one language, switch to another for a single word (usually the amusing or more powerful word), and then return to the original. Code-switching is the term used by linguists. In Karachi, mothers do this every afternoon. Over a single pizza slice, Brooklyn teenagers converse in three different languages. It is currently keeping some of the most expensive minds in artificial intelligence up at night in a few windowless research buildings in California and London. When you consider it, it is odd that the frontier…

The majority of people outside the system are unaware of a minor but persistent issue that exists within Tucson’s public schools. A kindergartener is suspected of having a speech disorder if they speak Spanish at home and English during recess. She must be evaluated by the district. The waiting then starts. Occasionally, a month. Three at times. Families wait closer to ten during the worst periods. When a qualified assessor finally sits down with a bilingual child, the school year is almost over, and she is still perplexed as to why she has been pulled out of class so frequently…

Dinnertime in a bilingual kitchen has a certain sound. When reprimanding a child for using elbows on the table, a mother switches from English to Spanish. The adolescent responds in English. Half-listening from the couch, the grandmother says something that sounds more like her village dialect than any Spanish textbook. No one stops. No one interprets. Just as water finds the easier route, so too does the conversation flow. Even though the family would never characterize it as such, it’s difficult to ignore that something economically significant is taking place in homes like these. For a long time, economists considered…

The regulations were subtly altered somewhere between the previous hiring cycle and this one. If you walk into a logistics company in Rotterdam or a mid-sized tech company in Austin, the person in charge of the meeting is just as likely to switch from English to Spanish in the middle of a sentence. No one recoils. That would have seemed like a minor performance a few years ago. It feels like a Tuesday right now. The bilingual boss is not a concept for the future. It’s already taking place. We might not have noticed it because it entered through the…