By Britta Aagaard

The digital divide runs along linguistic lines. While billions of people now carry powerful computing devices in their pockets, most of the world’s 7,000+ languages remain locked out of the digital revolution. The technology that powers our voice assistants, translation apps, and search engines works beautifully for English, Mandarin, and maybe a hundred other widely-spoken languages. But for the rest, there’s a gap.

I’ve spent 25 years in the language and localization industry, watching this gap widen despite our best efforts. The truth is that no single company, government, or organization can solve this problem alone. The scale is simply too vast, the linguistic diversity too complex, and the resources required too substantial for any one entity to tackle effectively.

Developing robust language technology for a single low-resource language requires extensive text corpora, audio recordings, linguistic expertise, computational resources, and years of iterative development. Multiply that by thousands of languages, and the challenge becomes clear. We need a fundamentally different approach.

Community leadership is the answer to sustainability

The most sustainable language technology comes from communities themselves. At CLEAR Global, I’ve witnessed community-driven projects outlast and outperform top-down initiatives. When speakers of Aymara, Kanuri or Marma lead the development of solutions for their own languages, something remarkable happens. The technology reflects actual usage patterns, incorporates cultural nuances that outsiders miss, and enjoys immediate adoption because it solves real problems that the community itself identified.

This is a pragmatic strategy. Community ownership ensures long-term maintenance and evolution of language tools. When people shape the initiatives that affect them, they don’t just use the resulting technology; they champion it, improve it, and adapt it to changing needs. A translation app developed by and for a language’s own speakers will always be more accurate, more culturally relevant, and more widely used than one created by well-meaning technologists who don’t speak the language.

Community enthusiasm alone isn’t enough, though. These projects need fuel: funding, technical infrastructure, and expert support. Strategic investment transforms potential into reality. A small nonprofit working with low-resource language communities can accomplish far more with proper backing than a Fortune 500 company launching a standalone commercial product. The nonprofit builds capacity within the community itself, creating sustainable ecosystems rather than dependencies.

Strategic funding multiplies impact

When you fund technical support for one community language project, you help far more than that single language. You create knowledge, tools, and training that can be adapted by plenty of other communities. You build networks of practitioners who share knowledge and resources. You demonstrate what’s possible, inspiring similar efforts worldwide. This networked, supported approach delivers exponentially greater impact than fragmented efforts or ventures that serve only the most profitable language markets.

Our baseline challenge: language data

But none of this works without high-quality data. Language technology runs on data: text, audio, grammars, linguistic annotations, and existing translations. For most of the world’s languages, we either don’t have this data in digital form or it exists in quantities far too small to train effective AI models. We desperately need sustained funding for research that addresses this fundamental bottleneck. This means supporting linguists working on documentation, funding digitization of existing materials, and developing new methodologies for efficient data collection in resource-constrained environments, or alternative routes such as synthetic language data.

The research challenges are significant but not insurmountable. How do we build effective language models with limited training data? What ethical frameworks should govern data collection and technology deployment in affected communities? These questions require serious investigation and solution design work, and that research needs funding commitments that extend beyond single grant cycles. Funding research that increases the availability and quality of low-resource language data is essential.

Moving forward with a collaborative approach

The language technology landscape stands at a crossroad. We can continue on the current path, where a handful of languages enjoy cutting-edge tools while thousands of others fade into digital obscurity. Or we can embrace a collaborative, community-centered model that distributes both the work and the benefits across the full spectrum of human linguistic diversity.

This vision requires resources. CLEAR Global is a nonprofit organization working to make this vision real by developing language technology with low-resource language speakers as the primary focus, not an afterthought. Our work prioritizes community needs, builds local capacity, and creates tools that actually serve the people who speak these languages. But we cannot do this critical work without support.

If you believe that language technology should serve all of humanity, not just the wealthy and numerous, I urge you to contribute to CLEAR Global. Individual donations directly fund the development of tools, resources, and infrastructure for languages that the commercial market ignores. For corporations in the technology, localization, and communications sectors, sponsoring CLEAR Global offers an opportunity to demonstrate genuine commitment to linguistic diversity while supporting work that benefits the entire industry. In supporting CLEAR Global, whether as an individual donor or corporate sponsor, you’re investing in linguistic justice and a future where nobody’s words matter less because of the language they speak. 

Britta Aagaard is a CLEAR Global Board member, Chief Business Officer at Semantix and a part of the executive leadership team of TransPerfect.