The Cervantes Institute warns: machine Spanish must not lose its accents
A statement from the Instituto Cervantes in Chile caught my attention this week. Its director, Luis García Montero, opened the Second International Conference on Spanish as a Foreign Language (CoIELE), held from October 7 to 9, and made one clear point: artificial intelligence is already unavoidable in education, so the responsibility is to watch how it is built.
What made me think most was the risk he described. If the language of AI is programmed without human supervision or a diversity of viewpoints, the Spanish of machines could become impoverished and homogeneous, losing its accents. According to the Cervantes, this cannot be left only to engineers. It is also the job of Spanish teachers, who understand the ethical responsibility of using a language. He proposes creating resources, encouraging diverse corpora and strengthening pan-Hispanic cooperation.
Some figures put the issue in perspective. One in ten native Spanish speakers lives in a country where Spanish is neither official nor the majority language, and the potential speakers outside the Hispanic world exceed 120 million. The institute also expects that by 2050, 86% of Spanish speakers will live in cities, which, according to its analyses, could harm minority and indigenous languages.
After the conference, the Cervantes signed an agreement with the Universidad de Viña del Mar to offer language and culture courses in Chile every year. A course on culture, art and history in Viña del Mar and Valparaíso is planned for 2027.
For those of us who learn or teach languages here, I think this is a good reminder. Using an AI tool to practice is fine, but it is worth asking which varieties of the language we have taught that tool.
Source: Instituto Cervantes
What made me think most was the risk he described. If the language of AI is programmed without human supervision or a diversity of viewpoints, the Spanish of machines could become impoverished and homogeneous, losing its accents. According to the Cervantes, this cannot be left only to engineers. It is also the job of Spanish teachers, who understand the ethical responsibility of using a language. He proposes creating resources, encouraging diverse corpora and strengthening pan-Hispanic cooperation.
Some figures put the issue in perspective. One in ten native Spanish speakers lives in a country where Spanish is neither official nor the majority language, and the potential speakers outside the Hispanic world exceed 120 million. The institute also expects that by 2050, 86% of Spanish speakers will live in cities, which, according to its analyses, could harm minority and indigenous languages.
After the conference, the Cervantes signed an agreement with the Universidad de Viña del Mar to offer language and culture courses in Chile every year. A course on culture, art and history in Viña del Mar and Valparaíso is planned for 2027.
For those of us who learn or teach languages here, I think this is a good reminder. Using an AI tool to practice is fine, but it is worth asking which varieties of the language we have taught that tool.
Source: Instituto Cervantes
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