IGF 2023 Lightning Talk #12 Digital Linguistic Justice and Multistakeholder Policymaking

Digital Linguistic Justice, Multistakeholder Information Policymaking, and the International Decade of Indigenous Languages With its call to protect and strengthen the use of indigenous languages around the world, the UNESCO-sponsored International Decade of Indigenous Languages (2022-2032) provides a push to further develop an emerging research agenda exploring the expression of linguistic rights in the digital sphere. To that end, this paper looks at the Global Action Plan of the Decade through the lens of critical informatics to identify and explore how and in what capacities it engages with the computational treatment of minoritized languages. Although the Global Action Plan envisions deep engagement with indigenous languages in the digital environment within the larger context of the expression of human rights, conceptual inconsistencies within the Plan demonstrate tension with its own key principles as well as principles such as indigenous data sovereignty. However, this conceptual conflict does not appear present in each of the individual National Action Plans for the Decade that have been submitted to date, a phenomenon that could be attributed to differences in the multistakeholder information policy processes employed at the global and national levels, among other factors. In comparing the larger framework of the Decade to individual national implementation plans, this paper contributes to the emerging empirical literature around linguistic justice for minoritized languages in the digital environment, as well as the already robust literature around multistakeholder information policy development.

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