Innovation in Language Learning

This talk argues that languages do not merely express identity but constitute it, and it asks what follows for language innovation once translation and standardisation are automated. Its aims are threefold: to reframe self-translation as the assembly of a second self rather than the transfer of meaning between fixed containers; to show how communities can be displaced without moving, as borders, constitutions, and official categories migrate across the people who stay; and to draw practical design and pedagogical conclusions for a field increasingly shaped by machine translation.

The discussion opens in Florence, where in the 1580s Stefano Bonsignori labelled the eastern Adriatic Schiavonia, the land of the Slavs, in the same Italian in which sclavus had, through that coast's slave markets, long since become "slave". From this image it develops three linked ideas: the linguistic ideologies carried by every tongue; Joshua Fishman's insight that identity survives only as it crosses the kitchen table; and the notion of "refugees without geography", communities that lose a homeland without ever leaving the village. It then introduces transparent digraphia, one language written in two interchangeable scripts and two distinct politics, and the categorical gap into which the in-between, twice-displaced self repeatedly falls: present everywhere, counted nowhere.

The stakes are practical. If language constitutes identity, then machine translation, standardisation, and identity-as-metadata risk optimising away the very selves they claim to serve. The talk closes with a design brief: preserve productive friction, honour script and variety, support intergenerational transmission, and make room for the in-between. It ends by proposing a pedagogy that treats a new language not as a code to be cracked but as a self to be inhabited.

Keywords: 

• Multilingualism
• Self-translation
• Digraphia
• Machine translation
• Ideology