LT4All and People Power 2025
Published:
It seems fitting to attend the 2nd Language Technologies for All conference (albeit remotely) on a day commemorating the People Power movement, an occasion to remember not only the EDSA protests but our long and still-ongoing history as Filipino people who continue to resist both external and internal forces that seek to oppress us.
Today we Filipinos may be, on the surface, liberated of imperial and dictatorial rule, but we are still undergoing many different forms of linguistic, technological, economic, and social oppression from dominant countries and corporations.
As Dr. Lorna Wanosts’a7 Williams of the Lil’wat Nation said in today’s inaugural keynote: “I haven’t heard enough about how our languages, our knowledge systems can be protected in this time of technology. Because technology is very, very fleeting. It changes, moment to moment. We need to be able to retain our knowledge systems far into the future. We cannot change our knowledge systems to fit the Euro-western world and that system. And that’s what’s happening now. And so colonisation continues.”
In an age where big tech like AI that purports to bridge language barriers is in fact perpetuating systemic global inequalities, how do we rethink and reclaim tech design to not only support the vitality of our own local languages and cultures, but also do so in a way that challenges and resists oppressive forces and exploitative practices?
How do we create a language and technology landscape where I, an upper-middle class Filipino raised in the country’s capital, did not have to grow up with English as my main language of fluency and expression, but instead had a social and political environment that nurtured the use of my heritage languages (Bicolano and Pangasinense)? Where these languages allowed access to education, employment, healthcare, legal systems, banks, literature, entertainment, and many other contexts to the same extent and privilege that English and (to a lesser extent) Tagalog currently do?
There are no immediate answers, but as with People Power, a movement that began not at EDSA but across many other expressions of resistance to the Marcos dictatorship long before it, there are many people in the Philippines and around the world already working towards these same aims. And we will create and pursue these answers together in solidarity – makikibaka at hindi matatakot.