What’s Wrong with Linguistic Digital Exclusion?

Existing digital technologies fully support only a handful of languages, mostly those of former colonial powers and those spoken in high-income countries. Meanwhile, all other languages are - to varying degrees – digitally excluded, for instance with limited or no availability of natural language processing tools such as spellcheckers, predictive typing or voice recognition, or unsupported by major websites and apps. Digital exclusion can be especially significant for languages with non-Latin scripts, either due to the hardware and coding being designed with a Latin default in mind or because their script is not yet supported by Unicode and so effectively digitally invisible. This paper will explore three explanations about why inequalities in digital supports are morally troubling. The first explanation has been suggested by researchers in various branches of linguistics (e.g. Kornai 2013, Zaugg 2024) and is that digital exclusion is wrong for making languages vulnerable to extinction. Meanwhile, a second answer can be reconstructed from a recent strand of work on linguistic justice (Patten 2014, De Schutter 2022) and is that digital exclusion is wrong for threatening certain morally salient interests of users of those languages. Finally, a third answer can be derived from a different strand of work on linguistic justice (Shorten 2017, Brando & Morales-Galvez 2023, Sayers 2024) and is that digital exclusion is wrong for undermining the capabilities of speakers of minoritised languages to flourish. After comparing these approaches a pluralist solution will be proposed.