#1. If AI can’t see you, do you exist?
If language is the gateway to intelligence, then whose intelligence is AI really built for?
Generative image inspired by Thandiwe Muriu. A man and woman with cornrows lie face-to-face, camouflaged within bold African wax print fabric. A visual meditation: if AI can’t see you, do you exist?
There are over 7,000 living languages spoken across the globe, but they are not equally seen, valued, or heard.
Nowhere is this linguistic richness more concentrated than in Africa, where an estimated 2,000 languages account for nearly one-third of the world’s total.
Asia and Oceania also host remarkable diversity, yet it is Africa that stands as both epicentre and litmus test for what it means to build truly inclusive, globally representative artificial intelligence.
This astonishing tapestry of tongues isn’t just cultural, it encodes distinct epistemologies, worldviews, and systems of innovation. Which is why linguistic inclusion in AI isn’t a technical nice-to-have. It is an epistemic necessity, and a moral, cultural, and political imperative.
You do not exist.
Language shapes access. AI determines who gets heard.
A Swahili-speaking mother sits with her child, holding a phone. An AI health assistant displays only English responses. Her expression shows concern as she tries to understand vital medical information.
When a Swahili-speaking mother turns to an AI health assistant and receives only English responses, the barrier isn’t merely technical, it’s existential.
Her ability to understand critical health information in her own language can shape decisions about her child’s illness or her reproductive care. In that moment, she encounters the frontier of digital exclusion: to be rendered linguistically invisible is to have one’s rights, needs, and knowledge discounted in the architecture of emerging AI systems.
Wolof-speaking farmer checking weather chatbot on phone. The interface does not recognise his language. He stands in a field beneath looming clouds.
A Wolof-speaking farmer whose language is indistinguishable on a weather chatbot is excluded from the knowledge economy at its source.
A Luganda poet faces a blank screen, their language rejected by a creative AI tool. In that silence, centuries of oral tradition are left without a future.
A Luganda poet told their language isn’t supported by creative AI tools isn’t just blocked from expression, their culture is written out of the future.
Even when AI does speak the “right” language, it often fails to recognise regional accents, dialects, or tonal nuance, mistranslating, mishearing, or misjudging its users. These are not bugs. They are design omissions; a result of language models never trained on these voices in the first place.
The economic cost of linguistic exclusion
When language is left out, people don’t just feel ignored, they opt out. This chart explains the economic cost of linguistic exclusion.
The cost of linguistic exclusion in AI, then, is not symbolic. It is structural, economic, and political, shaping who gets to participate in, benefit from, and co-create the next wave of intelligent infrastructure.
