Will Technology Make Our Language Skills Worse?
Two years ago, I wrote an article arguing that translation apps were no substitute for learning a language. My ultimate case was social — speaking the same language facilitates human connection in a way that can never be replaced by a creepy monotone robot. But at the time, the tech was also simply unreliable. However, I left open the possibility that the creepy robots probably would improve dramatically, and might one day be so convenient that it would undermine people’s desire to learn new languages.
I fear that that day has arrived. Last week, I visited China for the first time in eight years. Of many changes I observed, two stood out to me as paradoxical: while written English on signage, instructions, etc. had improved dramatically, actual people’s language skills seemed to have gotten worse. Even educated people and those working in service-oriented jobs, who previously would have had to develop some facility with English, now preferred to try to use their smartphones.
The result was better than nothing, and much better than the same tactic would have yielded even two years ago. But it was still just as awkward and impersonal and prone to miscommunications — now less in the quality of translation, but rather in lower-tech issues like the difficulty of passing a phone back and forth while on a walking tour or in a moving car.
One might suppose that China is an unusual case, with geopolitics now dividing Chinese people from the English-speaking world where, until recently, it brought them together. But I have observed the same phenomenon recently from Pakistan to Patagonia.
The trend is greatly facilitated by the fact that we are living more digital lives generally. Interpersonal communication through translators is, and always will be, cumbersome even with the best apps. But online, it is seamless. If you talk to people, stream entertainment, and learn about the world mostly on your smartphone, Google will happily convert the entire universe into your mother tongue.
Necessities like asking for directions, ordering food, or watching foreign blockbusters used to be the principal ways many people got started with foreign languages. But it is always awkward and difficult. I had previously spent a lot of time in China, but I was still slightly jittery talking to the airport cabbie last week; even in my own language, I dimly remember that ordering pizza as a little kid used to feel like a daunting task. Anyone can relate to that anxiety. But consider that, for kids growing up today (or adults in a new place), technology kind of obviates it. If you do not have to subject yourself to all that, why bother?
Overreliance on computers can also erode our skills in our own language. Some things are probably harmless adjustments to a new world. It may bother us that most kids born after 2000 or so cannot write legibly or spell, but elementary schools can hopefully find more efficient uses for time traditionally spent on pedantic former necessities.
But as technology has also become more adept at relieving us of things educated people really ought to know how to do. Most people agree we should not let high schoolers use ChatGPT to write their whole essays. But should we not also exercise the mental muscle it takes to express ourselves eloquently, rather than, as so many do now, outsource editing to Grammarly?
At the lower end of language skills, excellent voice recognition has relieved many people of the need to be literate at all. Traveling in South America last summer (winter?), I had a few experiences where someone I was chatting with would try to show me an interesting place to visit on my phone, then be bewildered because the (English-set) dictation button did not work in Spanish. They struggled to actually type things out. At some point, an overly convenient tool becomes a crutch.
The significance of new technology can vary by individual language. Penmanship used to be more important than it is now for European languages. But for others, the digitisation of writing is eroding a core aspect of the language. Persian was traditionally written in a flowing, quasi-diagonal script. On screens and print, that is increasingly replaced by a standard version that is convenient, easier to read, and soulless. The Mongolian government is trying to revive the traditional script, which is written top-to-bottom, but public enthusiasm has run up against the harsh reality that full readoption would entail designing a new Mongolian internet.
Young Chinese people can read characters as naturally as their parents, but having been raised typing words out as they are pronounced, many find they cannot really write them. A few years ago, the nation was scandalised by a poll that found that most students at Peking University (“the Harvard of China”) were unable to write the character “sneeze.” Likewise, Indians have resisted the convenience of just writing out Hindi words in the Latin alphabet, fearing a similar slide.
Paradoxically, the erosion of literary skills that digital technology facilitates has reintroduced to modern languages a feature from the archaic early stages of writing. Writing systems typically do begin as pictographs, drawing pictures of things. To oversimplify, they can develop either into characters based on sound, as alphabets do, or as more abstract logograms, like Chinese characters (or like our numbers, and the symbols above them on your keyboard).
In Japanese, which uses Chinese characters alongside two native alphabets, these symbols are called kanji. In the past decade or so, people around the world have adopted emojis. At first glance, these are straightforward, representing a mood, animal, object, etc. But as anyone who grew up in the 2010s knows, many have developed new shades of meaning (ask anyone who has ever received a wink face from a romantic interest). We are re-living, in real time, the early development of writing.
At the same time, the social media through which most people engage with one another and the world have grown less and less literate. Consider the progression of early blogs, to Facebook, to Instagram, to TikTok. Just ten years ago, using the most popular sites did require reading and writing. If our ancient ancestors had had Reels, they might never have even bothered to decorate the walls of Lascaux.
It is a common impulse in linguistics to lament change, and the inevitable loss that entails. Here, as in my discussions of themes like “proper” English, minority dialects, or endangered Native American tongues, I try to avoid that. Change is inevitable, and, as we have observed, countless hours drilling spelling rules can probably be better used on other skills.
But, in writing as much as in foreign languages, worse language skills means less access to what language is for: engaging with other human beings. If you visit a country where you cannot speak a word of the language, you will feel an obvious, pervasive, and stark disconnect from the people around you. The same is true, in a subtler sense, for people who have less adequately developed skills in their own language.
Digital technology presents unprecedented opportunities, but we should be wary not to lean on it for things we ought to do ourselves. Between 2018 and 2024, the share of American adults who described themselves as consistently lonely rose from 46% to 58%. Zoom, Google Translate, and their ilk are excellent, groundbreaking tools. But they cannot and should not replace human connection.
