Lydia Liu and Anupama Rao

On language, our planet, and the chatbots.

By Alice Tecotzky

Watching Lydia Liu and Anupama Rao converse is like watching two bees zip through a garden. Their words zig-zag between one another, landing on ideas gently in an unchoreographed partnership. As Liu speaks, Rao nods along with varying degrees of vigor. When Rao talks, Liu smiles, quietly and to herself. Spending time with these two professors is like witnessing a secret language of collaboration, one that sustained them while co-editing Global Language Justice. 

Illustration by Jorja Garcia

Released in November 2023, Global Language Justice combines work from scholars, poets, and artists across disciplines. The contributors explore the links between linguistic and ecological loss, language justice in the digital sphere, linguistic adaptation among Indigenous communities, and spatial mapping. Liu is Columbia’s Wun Tsun Tam Professor in the Humanities, and Rao a professor in Barnard’s history and Columbia’s Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies departments. Together, they recruited thinkers from across the country to define justice in a new conceptual mode. Though the contributors write of destruction—ecological, linguistic, sociopolitical—they do not operate in the vocabulary of mere death. Language is living and life-affirming, sustained by and sustaining communities.  

In their introduction, Liu and Rao explain that the book investigates “the lifeworld of languages—always in the plural—as being intrinsic to the larger ecological, political, and socioeconomic processes that cut across developed and developing societies.” Sitting in a spacious office in Kent Hall, Liu and Rao talked to me about vitality in their book, their partnership, and their own linguistic lifeworlds.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

…

The Blue and White: I want to start by talking about the two of you: how you got connected and met, and what the nature of your relationship is.

Anupama Rao: Professor Liu and I worked together as colleagues and compatriots because she was the director of the Institute of Comparative Literature and Society. I was Associate Director. This was nine years ago. Lydia invited me to be Associate Director and shortly thereafter, we applied for a Mellon Sawyer grant, which allows you to put together a year-long seminar around a theme. The idea was to think about a kind of new conceptual space around something called “global language justice,” one that went beyond a simplistic sense of opening up access to think about the ways in which our global moment—climate crisis, catastrophe—was coming together with a moment in which you were seeing the extinction of languages. And also the ways in which a global English was snuffing out the plenitude and singularity of language worlds. We applied for the grant, we got it, and we ran a seminar over two years. 

Lydia Liu: We were not interested in the usual approach to language. We make it very clear in the introduction that we’re not going to take language as an instrument for communication. We were looking for other ways to think about the relationship between language and ecology. And this was in the context of the disappearance of so many languages. People pay a lot of attention to climate change, to immigration, to all of these socioeconomic factors that affect our life. But language seems to be invisible in that whole process. We wanted to make this problem visible.

AR: As Lydia was saying, we wanted to stay away from the catastrophic model of, “All is gone, this is extinction, nothing can be done” on the one side. And on the other, a happy, “Let’s all think through ways we can communicate.” We wanted to animate and activate both sides of that equation.

LL: There were many discoveries we made in this process, because we worked with so many people, scholars, artists, activists coming from different languages. So we were also interested in learning about their stories.

B&W: I want to ask a little bit more about how you found the contributors and connected with them, and how your relationship with them evolved. What was the nature of your communication? What was the language you all shared with one another?

LL: A good number of the contributors and interlocutors come from Columbia University. They’re colleagues. We had all kinds of collaborations, including co-teaching. It was a process of discovery. Before doing this, we didn’t know that there are more than 700 languages spoken in New York City. It's astonishing!

AR: And that alerted us, because it speaks to the adjacency between languages. There’s both a kind of indifference, but there’s also a proximity to them. And that creates new possibilities of translingualism. The people we brought in started alerting us to people that we should be paying attention to. Initially we did think quite carefully about there being an arc. You could almost say you had poetry and law, and then in between that we had people doing digital mapping, people thinking through things like border and asylum rights. Both of us also work outside of the North Atlantic, so we were quite attentive to the global purchase. This is not a story where we should be sitting and thinking from the perspective of Europe and the United States.

B&W: Talking about that shape in the book, something I appreciated was when essays would reference each other. I’m curious about how people communicated with each other once you brought them into the project?

LL: It was during the pandemic when we were ready to actually put the book together. But before that we had many workshops, so people knew each other. And of course, that’s the role of the editor. We made them read each others’ work and asked them specifically to look at the convergence of their interests. 

AR: We did bring things together, and because it was a tough set of conversations we also needed people who are very generous and able to step outside of their own space. I think we found people like that. 

B&W: I think of the book as multilingual itself in how it considers many ways we might create linguistic justice. Could you expand a little bit more on your idea that the ecological devastation we’re facing lines up with the silent disappearance of so many languages, particularly for Indigenous communities?

LL: The poets are the ones who are most sensitive to these issues. For instance, in Mohammad Bennis’ poem. He is a Moroccan poet. He talks about speaking and breathing and death. Quite a few poets talk about death. Speaking is primarily about breathing. If you stop breathing, you die. If you extend that to an entire language community, you sort of know what’s happening. And that’s why we included the poets, because they are the most sensitive group of people who really can link language to ecology. 

AR: That’s one element of what we tried to do. I like very much what Lydia said, that there’s a kind of sensitivity. There’s also a kind of elliptical nature to poetic language, which allows you to inhabit that experience in a very different way. For instance, there’s Abhay Xaxa, who is an Indigenous poet who passed away at a very young age. He has an interesting poem called “I Am Not Your Data.”

LL: Xaxa was also an Indigenous activist speaking about Indigenous demands for land. So the question of land is very, very central to our concern. 

AR: It’s a real question of spatial inequality. Land is about a kind of grounding identity, a kind of belonging and its relationship to language. And that’s why using things like mapping and visualization became a powerful way for us to think about proximity, adjacency, and far-ness.

LL: Let me give you four lines from Xaxa’s poem: “I am not your data, nor am I your blank vote / I am not your project, or any exotic museum object, / I am not the soul waiting to be harvested, / Nor am I the lab where your theories are tested.”

B&W: That theme of not being reduced to a data point, or a theory, or a census label was striking to me in Wesley Leonard’s essay talking about his Miami tribe. 

AR: He was a late discovery for us. We found what he was doing so interesting. This is not about the ethnography of preserving Native American languages. He rejects all of that.

B&W: I’m curious about his message of linguistic resilience and his push against viewing Indigenous languages as stagnant. How might that relate to ecological devastation? Can we apply a similar method or way of thinking about resilience and adaptivity to regenerating our planet?

LL: [Leonard] is pushing back against that preservationist approach to Indigenous languages. But what’s so interesting is that we’re really dealing with the uprooting and displacement of indigenous Native Americans. That is an historical fact. The next question is: After people are displaced, what happens to the community? The languages are gone and anthropologists would go—

AR: —would go and put the puzzle together. But not in terms of living languages.

LL: That’s right. That’s the life and death of language that we’re talking about. Leonard came up to complicate this whole situation. 

AR: And there’s no authenticity. It’s not as though people don’t have access to a computer, or access to ways of revivifying languages in the conditions in which they find themselves. It’s very political. 

LL: I think he makes a very good point. When you think about English, it has absorbed so many foreign languages and vocabularies. Why is it not possible for an indigenous language also to absorb English and French, like in the case of Miami? This is a double standard. We can tolerate the multilingual makeup of English, but we are demanding purity of Indigenous languages. 

B&W: I want to switch gears a bit to talk about the essays on Unicode (the international linguistic standard that supports searching, texting, emailing, etc.) and equitable access to digital technologies. Those pieces were written by contributors, but how do you two think about the ways in which modern technology either enables or hinders global language justice? 

LL: We’re not just making a point about the importance of technology for the goal of preserving communication or to ensure that certain languages will survive. We were also thinking about the confusion that people usually have about technology, and we wanted to clarify that in our work. That is, are we talking about a script? Or a writing system? Or language as an object of linguistic  study? Or are we talking about speech? These are different things. 

B&W: I’m curious if you have thought at all about how AI might factor into this. The chatbots are called large language models. What implications might AI models have for linguistic justice, if any?

LL: AI models, like chatbots, rely on the size of the data. More “high-resource languages,” in computer terms, would have an advantage in the number of documents people post on the internet, for example. The variety of data, the sheer amount of data—you can’t compare that to the data resource available for English. 

AR: Part of the AI model is also the frequency of use. It becomes better the more you train it. That kind of interactivity also forecloses the unexpected, the unintended, the error. But much of the world that we’re working in and thinking about is in that space. 

LL: If you want me to predict, these large language models will further jeopardize languages that do not have enough resources to train the models. English and a number of major languages will have an advantage. So that will discourage young people from using their own languages. 

B&W: I’m really interested in the question you raise about poetry and the affective space of language and sound, so I want to bring it back to New York. I’m a native New Yorker and I think a lot about the sounds of this city. What is the quintessential New York City language to you? I don’t mean something like English, or Spanish, or Baïnounk, but more the smells, the feelings, the noises that make up your language of New York. 

LL: If you go on the subway, you hear the languages and you really don’t know what people are speaking. And that’s New York. You don’t have to take linguistics to understand how vital language is for social life. How do you count languages? Within linguistics, there has been an ongoing debate about named languages. The languages that are not named—what do you do with them? Are they not languages? We’re also interested in theoretical questions. The census data leads to larger issues.

B&W: To finish off, I have a question that distills language down in a way that’s, perhaps, totally contradictory to this book. Have you thought about translation? Making this book available in a number of written languages or oral languages?

AR: Speaking of limited resources! I guess we are all carriers of this message now because we have so many people who got kind of transformed through working on the book, but also just coming to our workshops. So maybe we’re all kind of carrying that message. The translation is tough.

LL: It came out just a few months ago. 

AR: Right. It took us a long time to put this together. And now to think about this. Hopefully there’s a co-sharer who says, “Hey, I want to do this!” We could think about disaggregating [the essays]. A lot of people who are practitioners and are actually teaching in community college classrooms or classrooms where they’re experiencing a lot of multilinguality have found this radical and powerful. They found that it had some really great pedagogical purpose, in addition to being theoretically interesting.

B&W: Do you feel hopeful? Whether about the planet, or languages, or those two things combined? It’s hard for me to feel hopeful sometimes—do you see glimmers of hope, sometimes, somewhere?

AR: Oh, for sure. I think our students are on fire. Being in an activated classroom in the way that Lydia was describing—there’s a lot of hopefulness. The world is in a dark place, in a really dark place. My general tendency is to walk the dark side and think that we need to figure out some really big ways to bring about major structural changes. But I think something like this, that is also very grounded and practical, is about making and doing in the moment that you’re in.

LL: It’s not possible to predict. But there are so many organizations, institutions, and individuals who demand justice. And that is hope.