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That's the question I asked of a thought-provoking panel on language acquisition at the 17th Global Legal Skills Conference at the Faculty of Law at Masaryk University (MUNI) in Brno, Czechia, Thursday.
Panelists discussed the question whether foreign language acquisition will remain a virtue in a world in which artificial intelligence increasingly makes communication seamless across borders.
Karen Lundquist, University of Minnesota Law, answered aptly, in sum, "It depends." Certainly there are client interactions she can now have with AI translation tools, Lundquist said, that might not have been possible before. But those conversations do not perfectly replicate connection in a shared language. At least for now, MUNI linguist Kateřina Chudová said, there are non-verbal or near-verbal properties of communication that even AI cannot bridge, such as body language, cultural context, and irony.
Will AI get there? Probably, as fast as the technology is evolving. Attorney Luca Forgione observed that the world today looks ever more like the fictional Minority Report, a film that came out more than 20 years ago (2002). (I noted in the Q&A that Philip K. Dick published the story "The Minority Report" in Fantastic Universe in 1956!)
Disclaiming that I am no expert in linguistics, I asked in the Q&A that the panelists might reflect on the science showing that language and a person's very perception of reality are causally interactive, that is, something of a chicken-or-egg problem. For example, I said, it's almost self-evident that how a language uses tense is indicative of how a culture understands time.
In a world of AI translation, then, are we on the cusp of a global cultural convergence? More to the point: Will AI universalism cost humanity a multiplicity of realities?
My answer to the central question on the panel, whether foreign language acquisition still has value, is an emphatic yes, for much the reasons the panelists posited. I'm no polyglot, but with just one other language and a smattering beyond, I understand the powerful link between speech and thought. Thinking about how I would conjugate a verb in Spanish sometimes helps me to rethink how best to say it in English. For example, the imperfect tense in Spanish evokes a sense of time with no precise English equivalent.
Forgione said in response that even not knowing all of the six languages his wife and children know, he can detect differences in tone that correlate to language, especially in emotionally laden contexts. Having various languages in my extended family, I understand that. Lundquist, who lived many years in Rome, suggested that Italian, for example, possesses a richer capacity than some other languages to communicate emotional intensity. That's a controverted proposition. Yet it does feel credible to me, remembering my Italian relatives and some of the language.
The differences might run deeper than the merely interpersonal. The question I asked the panel in Brno about the science of language was informed by a memorably haunting episode of Radiolab from more than a decade ago. "Colors" (2012) is widely regarded as a classic installment of the groundbreaking podcast.
To put criminally concise description to but one proposition of "Colors": Analysis of poetry suggests that ancient peoples might not have perceived the color "blue" before they acquired a word for it. With no concept of "blue," they didn't describe the sky that way. But it's not just a problem of description. With no human concept of blue, did blue even exist?
I know, you're thinking, well, there was still light at the shorter-wavelength end of the visible spectrum. But dig a little deeper. It's really a variation on the tree-falls-in-the-forest problem. And the answer is important, because in a world of intelligent—dare I say sentient?—machines, it's becoming less clear whose perception gets to define reality.
After the panel, I was fortunate to meet Lindsey Kurtz, a linguist and teacher at Penn State Dickinson Law. She taught me that the scientific concept I was after is called "the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis," or "linguistic relativity." Learn more at the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences podcast (2023) or at the Lingthusiasm podcast (2025).
The idea, restated by anthropologist Edward Sapir in 1929, is that structures of language are interrelated with perception and thought themselves. There are weaker and stronger versions of the hypothesis to describe the depth and inextricability of the interrelationship.
The implications quickly become surreal. Does something exist before the mind can describe or memorialize it? The answer might be no. That is, it's possible that words are not a consequence of reality. At least sometimes, words might cause reality, that is, bring it into existence. Language is literally creative.
So what happens if language differences go away? What if artificial intelligence causes a convergence of the human diversity expressed in language, leaving behind only monochromatic modules of machine-readable meaning for our consumption?
Is it possible, then, that humans will lose the ability to create new concepts? that our creative well will run dry? Or worse, might we inadvertently and irrevocably transfer our creative power to AI? Will AI create new planes of reality beyond our comprehension and leave us behind to wallow in the blissful ignorance of "the matrix" (the "simulation hypothesis")? Are we in it already?
In Brno, or at least in the Brno matrix, there was nary an objection to the proposition that foreign language acquisition continues to have value for learners, including lawyers, professors, and law students. As yet, there is no perfect proxy for language to effect a meeting of human minds.
Yet Star Trek's "universal translator," or Doctor Who's "voice integrator," is every day less a fiction. And that appealing Utopian imagining might camouflage a grim threat to the infinitude of humanity.
The Global Legal Skills Conference is a project of the Global Legal Skills Institute. Conference and institute are passion projects of a long-time colleague I greatly admire, Mark Wojcik, Illinois Law, whom I first met in the Association of Legal Writing Directors (ALWD) in 1997; and others in his coterie, including the sharp-minded Lurene Contento, Chicago-Kent Law, who moderated the panel: "Is Language Acquisition Still a Valuable Global Legal Skill?"
Colleagues and I presented on another panel at the conference, which I wrote about on June 2.
