“We speak English to survive. French to impress. Creole to those we love.” M. Murat
By Samson Williams, Anthropologist-in-Residence
That’s the truth of humanity’s last defense: language. Not the clean, optimized kind that AI understands but the kind that drips with history, pain, rhythm and love. The kind that carries ghosts between syllables.
See, Artificial Intelligence doesn’t understand language. It understands linguistics: data, syntax, probability. But language was never about communication; it was about communion. And that’s where the machine fails. It can translate what you say but not what you mean.
In the rush to automate everything, we forgot that the most sacred thing about being human is being misunderstood and still choosing to try again. The algorithm wants clarity. But humans? We thrive in ambiguity, tone, slang, irony, and code.
That’s why in the post-AGI world, multilingualism isn’t a luxury. It’s survival. To speak in multiple tongues is to exist beyond the reach of automation. Because once AI masters the languages of empire (English, French, Spanish) it will know how to sell, to seduce, to govern. But it will never know how to belong.
The future belongs to those who can code-switch. Who move between Spanish and Swahili, between Arabic and slang, between the corporate “good morning” and the hood’s “you good?” That “you good?” alone carries a library of meanings no dataset can decode. It’s question, warning, love, threat, and prayer all at once. The algorithm doesn’t stand a chance.
So when I say teach your children languages, I don’t mean for résumés. I mean for rebellion. Teach them English so they can read the enemy’s laws. Teach them French so they can charm a room. Teach them Swahili so they remember where rhythm was born. Teach them Mandarin so they understand the language of power. Teach them Arabic to converse with God. Teach them Hindi so they can communicate in orbit. And teach them Creole — or whatever dialect their grandmother wept in — so they never forget who they are.
Because when AI listens, it listens for patterns. When humans speak, we leave silence....space....for meaning to breathe. In that space is where language defeats AI.
One day, the machines will know every word we’ve ever spoken. But they’ll still never understand the moment a mother switches tongues mid-sentence to scold and protect in the same breath. They’ll never understand the intimacy of two lovers building a new dialect only they know. They’ll never feel the rebellion in a Baltimore boy saying something so local, so alive, that no one outside his block could ever repeat it right.
Those are the new Code Talkers. Not soldiers in a desert but poets in the algorithmic wasteland; speaking in tongues the machine would need ears to touch.
In the end, survival won’t belong to those who speak perfectly. It’ll belong to those who speak humanly.
Samson
Epilogue - my son is 2.5 years old and speaks english, french, Creole and spanish. My daughter is almost 4 months and I can confidently say that she speaks the same languages as her big brother. So the trick is to build an education system (that does not yet exist) that sustains these four basic languages and then craft an ecosystem that integrates Arabic, Mandarin, Japanese, Hindi and Swahili seamlessly into it. This new educational system should integrate these languages with no more effort than toddlers whose native tongues are those who would spontaneously invent games and play them together at the playground, despite not speaking the same language. Because it is a toddlers ability to spontaneously communicate with each other, across the language barrier, where AI is the most envious and God smiles, so proud of his creation.
PS - After I wrote this I realized I missed Hindi and completely left Russian out. So I added Hindi in and smiled at how my patriotism subcontiously excluded Russian. Cause that right there is where the real war of the century is. What language will be the default language in an AGI / Spacefaring universe? Because the spoils aren't what the victor wants. What the victor wants is to write the story of his victory in his mother tongue. #Beltalowda