Tech's Impact on Minority and Endangered Languages - Charlotte Donnelly & Leah Mundy | PG 2025

Technology is often touted as a cure-all for many of our modern-day problems, including learning a new language or helping endangered or minority languages to survive. And why not? With the Internet, we can connect across the globe. With a keyboard, we can switch from English to Arabic to Chinese in an instant. But what about the dark side of all this tech? The rise of generative AI models has seen a louder push for using technology to achieve even the most mundane of tasks, but this new area is fraught with legitimate concerns, including the ways in which endangered and minority languages may be more unfairly disadvantaged in this sphere. Do the issues with these technologies outweigh the positive impacts they may have had on such languages? Why are people—on both sides—shouting about AI when the Internet has existed for decades? And what, if anything, can we do to assist endangered and minority languages in a future where only a handful of tongues come out on top? Charlotte Donnelly & Leah Mundy (uTalk) Leah Mundy is uTalk's Languages Manager and in-house language specialist. With a background in localisation, she currently works with a wide range of minority languages. She is currently learning Welsh. Charlotte Donnelly is uTalk’s Marketing Manager and has dabbled in plenty of languages, including some endangered ones. She’s passionate about language activism and revitalisation and, having spent far too much of her life online, is fascinated by where these areas come together. https://utalk.com/ This video was recorded at the Polyglot Gathering 2025: https://www.polyglotgathering.com.